Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c. 1870–1920

Laura Ugolini

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000381221
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: British History

This book explores the relationship between middle-class fathers and sons in England between c. 1870 and 1920. We now know that the conventional image of the middle-class paterfamilias of this period as cold and authoritarian is too simplistic, but there is still much to be discovered about relationships in middle-class families. Paying especial attention to gender and masculinities, this book focuses on the interactions between fathers and sons, exploring how relationships developed and masculine identities were negotiated from infancy and childhood to adulthood and old age.

Drawing on sources as diverse as autobiographies, oral history interviews, First World War conscription records and press reports of violent incidents, this book questions how fathers and sons negotiated relationships marked by shifting relations of power, as well as by different combinations of emotional entanglements, obligations and ties. It explores changes as fathers and sons grew older and assesses fathers' role in trying to mould sons' masculine identities, characters and lives. It reveals negotiation and compromise, as well as rebellion and conflict, underlining that fathers and sons were important to each other, their relationships a significant – if often overlooked – aspect of middle-class men's lives and identities.

Part I
Childhood

1 Contact and Separation

Introduction

Writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, the Reverend Edmund Boggis expressed his pleasure at fathers’ changed behaviour towards their infant children: ‘I do like to see a man walking about with his tiny child in his arms, or taking his youngster for a ride in a pram, his wife remaining at home’. He could well remember, he added, a time when ‘a father would regard the exhibition of such affectionate care as solely the mother’s province and “infra dignitatem” for a man, probably exposing him to ridicule’.¹ In reality, the sight of a late Victorian or Edwardian father pushing a pram would not always have been met with derision. John Crittall recalled going for a walk while on holiday in the Essex seaside resort of Frinton during the First World War, his father ‘pushing my eldest sister in a – pushchair with me walking on the side’, the only thing making this a memorable occasion being the fact that they saw a daylight air-raid taking place over Harwich.² Nevertheless, the consensus undoubtedly was that the primary carers of babies and young children, both girls and boys, should be women: mothers, female relatives or, in more affluent households, female servants such as nurses, nannies or nursery maids.³

Such a gendered division of labour leaves open the question of fathers’ role during their children’s early years – an issue that in recent years has received new scholarly attention.⁴ The first part of this chapter thus joins the discussion by questioning the extent to which middle-class fathers were involved in the day-to-day, routine care of their children. It suggests that although the hands-on work of washing, dressing and feeding was mostly left to women, plenty of fathers took a keen interest in nursery matters and became involved themselves at times of trouble, illness, or when nobody else was available. Even then, the boundary between paternal and maternal responsibilities was not entirely erased. As the following section suggests, furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that points to the limited amount of time fathers and young sons spent together, whether because of the former’s employment and other responsibilities, or the latter’s leaving home for boarding school: days, weeks, or even months could go by with fathers and sons seeing little of each other, either at home or outside it. Such absences, however, were punctuated by significant moments when fathers and sons came together. The final section of this chapter turns to such points of contact: these interactions may not always have been a pleasure, but nevertheless mattered, both to fathers and to sons. Paying especial attention to ‘a father’s traditional duty to his son – to train him in manliness’,⁵ the chapter concludes by questioning the extent to which fathers were able and willing to take on the roles of instructors and sources of information on masculine skills and practices.

Childcare

When Darcy Kitchin was five, in the late 1860s, a doctor told his father, then only in his mid-forties, that he had to give up his business as a hop merchant and move from Worcester ‘to a more bracing climate’ for the sake of his health. The family duly decamped to Scarborough, where his father’s health quickly improved and where – no longer busy with work – he became deeply involved in the children’s upbringing: he ‘believed in plenty of milk, double-soled boots, stout clothes and wool next the skin. He ran us like a school, and our numbers, which were already nine, with the promise of more, no doubt justified him’.⁶ Such detailed paternal supervision was unusual, especially where female carers were present. Among the middle-class men interviewed by Thea Vigne and her colleagues in the mid-1970s, none could recall their father bathing or dressing them, brushing their hair, putting them to bed or binding cuts.⁷ Ernest Sadd Brown could not remember his businessman ‘father coming into the nursery at all’, while Stephen Lloyd’s father, the manager of a Birmingham engineering firm, would occasionally come up, but to play with, rather than care for the children.⁸ According to Archie Yuillie, ‘fathers in those days were much more detached than they are today’, although as John Crittall pointed out, the fact that his father did not spend much time putting plasters on knees and ‘that kind of thing’ did not mean he was uninterested in his children. On the contrary, ‘he was a devoted father’, but ‘there were other people to do it’.⁹

As a number of historians have noted, a middle-class father’s role in the care of infants in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century households was primarily seen as a supportive one, deployed particularly at times of domestic crisis or when no other help was available.¹⁰ Even in these circumstances, fathers’ assistance was not guaranteed. Professor Philip Sargant Florence and his wife, the journalist and birth control campaigner Lella Secor Florence, had two children during and immediately after the First World War. Asked by Vigne in 1975 whether he had ‘look[ed] after them and change[d] their nappies’, Florence explained that ‘I tried to sleep with them because my wife was getting rather tired’, but he does not seem to have persevered long. He admitted that ‘I wasn’t much good at that … I just didn’t sleep at all’.¹¹

That said, there is plenty of evidence of fathers who took on an active childcare role at times of sickness or other family crises. In summer 1916, thirty-seven-year-old George Adcock, the London representative for a Loughborough firm of printers and stationers, applied for exemption from military service, partly on the basis of his role in looking after his five children, three boys and two girls, all under twelve. His wife, who suffered from varicose veins, ‘is often not able to do all that is required’ and they did not have friends in London who could help. He thus stepped in, particularly with the three young boys, who, he stressed, ‘require a father’s care’.¹² Middle-class fathers, it seems, did not always delegate childcare, particularly during periods of illness.¹³ Although their relationship later became troubled, in his early years Stuart Cloete’s father seems to have been patient and gentle. He entertained the young Stuart by making ‘shadow pictures – men and animals – on the wall with his hands and a handkerchief. I enjoyed this very much. He also told me stories’. He really came into his own at times of illness: ‘when I was teething and could not sleep my father carried me up and down, singing: “Oh Susannah”, “I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls”, “Old MacDonald had a farm”, “Camptown Races” ’.¹⁴ Not long after the birth of his brother in 1906, while on holiday in Geneva, Borys Conrad became ill with whooping cough, followed by pleurisy and rheumatic fever. While his mother cared for the new baby, much of the nursing devolved to his father, the novelist Joseph Conrad, and as Borys ‘began to recover he took charge of me completely and no invalid could have a more devoted attendant … He would read to me for long periods and make birds or other things out of sheets of paper which he folded with great dexterity’.¹⁵

Most middle-class fathers became involved in the day-to-day care of infants on a more permanent basis only in exceptional circumstances or in the absence of suitable female alternatives: most notably, perhaps, after a mother’s death.¹⁶ H.H. Bashford described the experiences of his friend’s uncle Leslie, a successful and we...