Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries : Regional Perspectives [1 ed.] 9781443815918, 9781847182920

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Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Regional Perspectives

Edited by

Barry M. Doyle

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Regional Perspectives, edited by Barry M. Doyle This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Barry M. Doyle and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-292-5; ISBN 13: 9781847182920

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures.................................................................................................... vii List of Tables....................................................................................................viii Preface ................................................................................................................ ix Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1 Urban Politics And Space In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries: Regional Perspectives Barry M. Doyle Part I: The Structures of Politics Chapter One....................................................................................................... 30 Conflict, Community and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Urban Politics: A Case Study of the Black Country Richard Trainor Chapter Two ...................................................................................................... 47 Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics Nick Hayes Part II: Politics, Institutions and Urban Management Chapter Three .................................................................................................... 64 “Policing” Party Politics In The Midlands, c.1900-1938 Shane Ewen Chapter Four...................................................................................................... 80 Lancashire Public Asylum Provision: Regional Co-Operation, Local Rivalry and Factional Interest, 1889-1914 Bob Hayes

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Table of Contents

Chapter Five ...................................................................................................... 99 Council Wars: Manchester’s Overspill Battles Peter Shapely Part III: Governance, Discourses and Space Chapter Six ...................................................................................................... 118 Assessing Accommodation Standards In The Early Victorian Period Geoff Timmins Chapter Seven.................................................................................................. 134 Revisiting The Slums In Manchester And Salford In The 1930s Bill Luckin Chapter Eight................................................................................................... 148 “The Girls Have Gone To Weave By Steam”: Representing The Female Crowd In The Textile Towns Of The Central Pennines George Sheeran Chapter Nine.................................................................................................... 160 The Politics Of The Working-Class Suburb: Walthamstow, 1870-1914 Tim Cooper Bibliography.................................................................................................... 173 Contributors..................................................................................................... 191

LIST OF FIGURES

Map 1 Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

The Black Country and its Vicinity in the Later Nineteenth Century................................................................................................ 32 Turnout in Local Government Elections, 1841-1901 .......................... 38 Average Turnout in Parliamentary Elections ...................................... 40 Persons of Unsound Mind Reported and Under Care: England and Wales 1859-1909.......................................................................... 81 The Queen Street Area of Preston in the late 1840s.......................... 124 Little Ireland, Manchester in 1831 .................................................... 125 Little Ireland, Manchester in 1849 .................................................... 126 Moor Street and Cleaver Street, Blackburn, 1847............................. 128 Housing in the Nova Scotia area of Blackburn, 1847 ....................... 129 Interior of Marshall’s Flax Mill, 1843............................................... 155 Eyre Crowe, The Dinner Hour, Wigan.............................................. 156

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1............................................................................................................ 34 The Development of Local Government to 1900 Table 1.2 ........................................................................................................... 34 Local Government Electorate as a Percentage of Estimated Adult Males c. 1850-1900 Table 1.3 ........................................................................................................... 36 Frequency of Contests in Elections to Boards of Health, Improvement Commissioners, Borough and Urban District Councils, 1850-1899 Table 2.1............................................................................................................ 51 Occupation of City Councillors and Aldermen Leicester, 1881-1931 Table 2.2............................................................................................................ 54 Social Class of Occupied Male Council Members Birmingham City by Party, 1930-1966 Table 2.3............................................................................................................ 56 Committee and Patronage Distribution in Inter-War Nottingham Table 3.1............................................................................................................ 70 Party Representation on Birmingham and Leicester Council and Watch Committee (%) 1900-1936 Table 3.2............................................................................................................ 72 Average Length of Office of Watch Committee Chairmen 1870-1939 Table 3.3............................................................................................................ 73 Party Political Resolutions on Leicester Watch Committee, 1901-38 Table 4.1............................................................................................................ 87 Employment of Inmates at the Lancashire Inebriates Reformatory

PREFACE

This collection of essays draws on work presented to two conferences in the north-east of England during 2003, the Conference on Regional and Local History (CORAL) meeting at Teesside on Urban Life since the Eighteenth Century: Regional Perspectives and the Urban History Group meeting at Durham, Reassessing Urban Politics. The idea to collect the essays in book form was promoted originally by the CORAL executive and I received help and support in the early stages from Melanie Tebbutt and Tony Pollard. Maureen Galbraith of the Economic History Society and the Centre for Local Historical Research at Teesside provided logistical and financial support for the conferences whilst Bob Morris helped significantly with the academic programme for Durham. In putting together the book I have been assisted greatly by the other contributors who have responded to my requests promptly and kept faith in me. Richard Rodger and Graham Ford read and provided very helpful feedback on my introduction. Sue Hepworth organised the bibliography and Shona Davie undertook the formatting and copy-editing. I have received financial support for the project from the History Research Group at the University of Teesside, CORAL and the School of Social Sciences and Law. Thanks to Cambridge Scholars Press for taking on the project and giving clear guidance and support when necessary. As always in producing a book of any type, I have to thank my family, Ros, Fergus and Nuala, for their patience and support and my cats, Brodie and Spider, for being fun when things got tough.

INTRODUCTION URBAN POLITICS AND SPACE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES: REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES BARRY M. DOYLE

This volume explores three inter-related themes in urban history – politics, space and region. Each remains of vital importance in contemporary Britain, with enduring debates about how much and what types of local democracy and local government are appropriate, especially in a world where participation in municipal politics continues to decline. Local politics has changed significantly since the 1970s, with the sustained challenge of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats to the post-war hegemony of the Labour cities and Tory shires, their popularity based on their championing of the public service consumer in the face of intransigent and inflexible bureaucracies and machines. Indeed, as the big battalions of public service recede into popular memory, local politics has become dominated by issues of space – clean and safe streets, order and disorder in town centres, regeneration through cultural quarters and the appropriate location of services, from hospitals to cinemas. Moreover, the players in these new politics are not just ‘the council’ and the central state, but partnerships which draw together local authorities, business, quangos, education and health care providers. Shaping and allocating this space and even deciding how and by whom it might be used, have sub-regional and regional implications. Funding, access, property rights, entrenched cultural preconceptions all influence the evolving regional shape of twenty first century Britain. The English, however, remain reluctant to engage with the possibility of regional government and democracy, seeing all local government as a charge on the community rather than as an opportunity to help shape and manage this major reallocation of space and power. The essays in this book examine the ways in which local power, space and regional relations developed and changed between the early nineteenth

Introduction

2

and mid-twentieth century. They focus on a number of themes that remain relevant today: ™ ™ ™ ™ ™ ™ ™

the nature, structure and power bases of local elites the impact of gender the part played by voluntary activity in the management of the urban the influence of ‘modernity’ on the development of urban politics and policies the role of culture, party and other factors in determining municipal decision-making the possible presence of a British ‘progressivism’ on the American model the inter-relationship between cities and their regions.

Within each of these themes, space is a central organising thread, particularly relevant in understanding the engagement with modernity and the emergence of progressivism. More importantly, it is the issue that has been at the heart of local politics and democracy for the last two hundred and fifty years. Politics has been a staple of urban history from the late 1960s, although recent years has seen the scope widen to incorporate a broader understanding of governance which accepts that not all elite control was exercised through elected representatives.1 Yet this widening of the study of urban politics has tended to emphasis the homogeneity of the elite, ‘the middle classes’, whilst diminishing the scale of the continuing and deep rooted divisions within the dominant groups in the nineteenth and twentieth century city. This volume will reintroduce and revise the history of party and competition, relating such competition to both space and region, each of which have been less well served by urban historians. Indeed, space has become more widely recognised as a suitable subject for study by historians.2 This reflects a growing awareness that the urban was not simply a location in which things happened, but that use, contest and debate around spaces and places within the town or city, helped to shape a range of urban identities: class, gender, ethnicity, race, politics and culture. The interaction of space with both narrow and broad political actions, however, remains under-researched and in particular how discourses about urban space could be employed to bolster class identity and/or political ends.3 Furthermore, contests over space could and did spill out to the subregional and regional level, where conflicts between small and large urban areas, city and country, modernity and tradition were played out with implicit or explicit class and ideological ends. Despite this observation, urban history in a regional context remains in its infancy. The study of regions in England has been pioneered by economic historians and is more

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advanced for the industrial revolution and post Second World War eras than for the period in between.4 Explorations of the Victorian City, or the transformation of the urban during ‘classic modernity’ (1890-1940), have tended to focus on individual towns and their relationship with the centre, rather than with other adjoining towns or even the wider economic or cultural region.5 Towns are rarely presented as providing a regional focus, as they have been in Germany or the United States,6 with urban resistance to the conurbation and fierce town pride frequently observed.7 Nevertheless, towns and cities clearly did help to shape regions and present positive, as well as negative, images of nascent regional urban identity and interest.8 It was at this level that politics, space and region could come together most forcefully; with urban figures either uniting to promote the collective interests of the region or, more often, to defend the culture and fabric of the region against the predatory tendencies of the big city. The rest of this introduction will explore these phenomena in more detail, addressing the emerging and changing historiography of urban politics, urban space and urbanity and region, illustrating the way that the chapters reflect and advance these debates.

Urban Politics Over the past thirty years, understanding of urban politics and the study of urban management have changed significantly. At the beginning of the 1970s “party” was central to understanding how the city was governed, with the dominance and decline of urban Liberalism and the inexorable rise of Labour key areas of debate.9 Derek Fraser’s studies of the nineteenth century and Peter Clarke’s Lancashire and the New Liberalism were significant in setting the parameters of research10 whilst the literature exploring contemporary local government, such as that of Bulpit and Sharpe, influenced both political scientists and historians.11 Central to these works was the idea that, whilst the party politics of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly structured by religion, early in the twentieth century this was replaced by class.12 The eclipse of religion by class and the ultimate triumph of Labour as the party of urban government were moulded by a deterministic view of political action. This tendency argued that, in the face of the challenge from working-class socialism, the middle classes united behind the Conservatives, squeezing out Liberalism along the way.13 This process was aided by the abandonment of the urban arena by elite figures, who surrendered their governing role to petite bourgeois and working-class activists,14 and by the rise of party as the main vehicle for conflict and ambition. In the ensuing battle for the city,

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Introduction

party conflict intensified whilst a form of politics shaped by culture rather than class, disappeared in all but a few odd places like Liverpool.15 As a result, during the 1970s and 1980s the study of urban politics concentrated on issues of class and the struggle for control of elected institutions. In particular, historians discussed the ‘classic’ bourgeois (usually Liberal) elite leadership of the middle decades of the nineteenth century (the era of the urban squirearchy), the extent, speed and effectiveness of Labour penetration of urban institutions, the political realignment of the urban middle class, elite withdrawal from the political, social and cultural life of the city and the impact of party and the change from ‘social leaders’ to ‘public persons’ in the management and organisation of urban political life.16 These discussions were shaped by a number of inherent teleological assumptions about ‘modernisation’ (including class determined political alignment, the novelty of party in local politics, the nationalisation of politics and political control of region and locality) which played down, or saw as aberrant, continuing manifestations of culture in political choice, local peculiarity, local initiative or evidence of party and ideology in earlier periods. Labour’s dominance of city politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century was read backwards, with their breakthroughs in the first third of the century assumed, rather than proven.17 Little attention was paid by political historians to the fate of middle-class politics in the early twentieth century, the complexities of middle-class realignment, or the enduring power of culture and ideology in political choice.18 Furthermore, concentration on elections, organisation and institutions meant that women played little part in the history of urban politics or governance, whilst the disenfranchised male was also largely absent given labour history’s focus on political institutions rather than popular politics.19 Novel approaches were apparent by the later 1980s, with seminal works by Patrick Joyce and Rick Trainor amongst others, refocusing the study of urban politics and suggesting the opportunity for a wider discussion of governance and participation.20 This approach was dominant by the end of the twentieth century, particularly in the field of Victorian urban history,21 yet its ascendancy raises some important questions about the nature of urban political competition. Just as the discourses of class and modernisation masked the heterogeneity of political affiliation through into the twentieth century, so studies of the elite, the middle classes or ‘governance’ have tended to create a new, undifferentiated world, in which conflict is down-played.22 Yet real differences of ideology and world-view existed within the middle class over religion, politics, temperance and attitudes to popular culture, as well as between the middle class and the workers.23

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Conversely, much of the study of the city and its structures has tended to take place in a political vacuum, with a particular emphasis on social and spatial segregation.24 Although such work became increasingly sophisticated, it tended to reinforce ideas about emergent class-based politics which have only recently been challenged by Doyle and Moore.25 In other respects, housing and planning (which have been the main focus for modern British urban history) became locked into generalised debates about the merits of planners’ ideas and their dissemination and about the gradual nationalisation of planning and housing policy in the course of the twentieth century.26 Developing central control also shaped much of the discussion around urban welfare provision, with the Edwardian period seen as a pivotal moment in the eclipse of local voluntary welfare provision.27 Recent studies, however, have highlighted the strength of voluntarism and the power of local authorities to make policy and plan,28 as shown by the contributions of Bob Hayes and Peter Shapley, amongst others, in this collection.

Gender As the foregoing suggests, the study of urban politics requires a reassessment in the light of important changes in the historical profession in recent years. First and foremost, to date most work on politics, the elite and space has paid little attention to the issue of gender. In particular, discussion of political involvement and elite withdrawal has tended to ignore the part played by women in continuing the role of elite families in the management of the urban. Undoubtedly, important research has highlighted the part women have played in conventional party work and the role of suffrage activity at the local level; whilst it is clear that women played a significant role in the nascent Labour party and could be very important players amongst local Labour activists.29 Mike Savage has even suggested that sensitivity to gender issues was vital to Labour success at the local level in the 1920s.30 Gender has also emerged as significant to the study of the use and control of urban space, with Lynda Nead, Judith Walkowitz and Krista Cowman all exploring the interaction of gender, sexuality and the politics of space utilisation.31 However, the role of women in the continuation of elite power structures in the twentieth century remains largely ignored. Initially raised by Doyle, it has received recent attention from James Hinton, who has highlighted the way women both took on increasingly important roles in existing voluntary organisations and created and developed their own associations as vehicles for managing women’s increased position in the urban sphere.32

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Introduction

Voluntarism These findings help to broaden our understanding of the process of elite withdrawal and its part in the apparent decline of voluntarism.33 Voluntarism had been a central part of elite culture and an essential element in the effective operation of urban politics for much of the nineteenth century.34 Not only were local politics entirely voluntary – in the sense that no one was paid either for serving on elected boards or even within party hierarchies – but much of the work which would later be seen as the responsibility of the state was actually undertaken by voluntary bodies. Welfare and charity, health-care (especially hospitals), education and even elements of policing and ‘reform’, were all provided and managed by voluntary organisations.35 Much leisure, most religion and a whole array of social networks, including clubs, literary and historical societies, complex organisations like friendly societies along with trade unions and employers’ organisations, were all in the hands of those willing to give freely of their time and energy and often their money. In nineteenth-century urban Britain, civil society was vast and voluntary.36 Yet most observers accept that voluntarism was in crisis between the wars (if not before), undermined by both state intervention and elite withdrawal. But this is, at best, simplistic. Undoubtedly some voluntary organisations went into decline in the twentieth century, especially general relief charities like the Norwich District Visiting Society, which saw its income fall from £300, from over 180 subscribers in 1903, to just £50, from 24 (corporate) subscribers by 1935, whilst the transformation of the Charity Organisation Society in the town was similarly precipitous.37 Others saw their role change, including friendly societies, whilst others still experienced change accompanied by growth, especially the voluntary hospitals.38 Furthermore, there were significant new editions to the voluntary sector, for example new types of generalist body, like Round Table, but also a whole tranche of female orientated and run voluntary bodies such as the Women’s Institute, or the Towns’ Women’s Guild, often providing a secular version of the services previously delivered by female-run religious bodies.39 Moreover, voluntary bodies provided a continued site for debate and conflict. For, far from the middle class abandoning these organisations, as suggested by Savage and Miles and others, they were often keen to hold on to power, especially in the voluntary hospitals, either through managed incorporation or implacable defence.40 Thus, voluntarism, even pan-class voluntarism, remained a central plank of urban governance until the 1970s, although in a highly diminished and almost invisible form. Indeed this scholarly invisibility

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was a product of a modernisation theory which privileged state welfare services whilst often regarding any continued role for the voluntary sector as a failure of policy.41

The Urban Elite The role of the elite and its changing structure has been an important element of recent urban history, in particular, discussions of the ‘quality’ of urban leadership and the relative merits of producers, professionals and the petite bourgeoisie.42 However, whilst production has, in recent years, given way to consumption as the main preoccupation of many social historians, again this is not particularly evident in the writings about urban politics.43 This is unusual, given much has been written on the development and specialisation of retailing as Britain developed as one of the most advanced consumer markets in the world.44 Although the limited literature on the politics of consumption in a British context has been dominated by discussions of the cooperative movement,45 food quality and regulation,46 Matthew Hilton and Frank Trentmann have begun to address more institutional and ideological responses through their work on debates around access to food, the morality of consumption and organised consumer groups, including those at local level.47 For urban historians, however, the debates have been less focused on issues of consumption, per se, and more on the significance of the shopkeeper in politics. In particular, two standard tropes in the literature of urban elites are the assertion that large-scale manufacturers gave way to shopkeepers in the council chambers of England and that shopkeepers were invariably parsimonious and conservative in politics.48 The triumph of the shopkeeper has usually been seen negatively, yet such a response privileges production over consumption and ignores a number of key changes in urban life in the course of the period. The growing prominence of retailers within the urban elite reflected a greater sophistication within the urban economy.49 In Middlesbrough, for example, the decreasing part played by the original ‘Ironmasters’ in the politics of the town reflected the development of a broader elite, as the town grew from just 20,000 people, at the time of incorporation in the 1850s, to almost 100,000 by the outbreak of the First World War. This growth created new stakeholders within the middle class, including professionals, managers, and retailers, some of whom, like the grocer, Amos Hinton, were major employers of labour who dealt on a daily basis with a much wider cross section of Middlesbrough society, including women, than did the old Ironmasters.50 Thus, retailers like Hinton, or Duckworth in Rochdale, were not only

8

Introduction

prominent businessmen, but also reflected the gradual shift taking place from production to consumption in British daily life. Viewed in this way, the increasing dominance of the retailer in municipal affairs should not be seen as a dilution of elite activism, or a slide into insular ‘shopkeeper politics’, but as a manifestation of profound urban change.51 It is important, moreover, to recognise that whilst British retailers, particularly those we might term ‘retail entrepreneurs’, may generally have turned to the right, they rarely moved outside the mainstream. Many remained Liberals and most were only ever poorly organised, and then for economic, rather than political ends.52 By the 1940s, the renegotiation of the urban landscape in the wake of the war and the drive for planning, put retailing high on the political agenda as planners saw the rationalisation of shops as a major goal.53 In such a hostile environment the shopkeeper was bound to be politically active, especially when his competitors in the Coop might have strong allies in the newly-triumphant Labour party.54

Space The contest for control of retailing sites in the era of planning highlights the growing significance of the politics of urban space in recent years. Orthodox discussion of both the urban and its politics have tended to see towns and cities as neutral stages upon which politics happened, or locations in which local and national politicians acted to reconfigure the shapes on the ground, a particular characteristic of studies on the transformation of politics in the early twentieth century.55 Yet, as the collection of Gunn and Morris has shown,56 space was a vital element of urban politics, with contests over specific areas leading to major conflicts and places within towns acquiring deep political meaning.57 In particular, historians have focused on how mapping and labelling space within the urban played a significant part in the promotion of policy whilst discourses about such themes as slums, tradition, heritage and the big city, all helped to shape types of urban identity, which cut across simple determinist models of class formation.58 A number of the contributions in this volume inform this debate in important ways, with Timmins, Luckin and Shapley illustrating the manner in which discussions about housing and its inhabitants acted as a prime engine in urban reform, but also the ways in which such physical and cognitive mapping led to struggles within towns, between town and country then, ultimately amongst historians.59 Identification of how urban space was arranged and employed – often inflected by censorious top-down attitudes – allowed both contemporaries and historians to develop critiques of the nineteenth and twentieth-century

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urban environment and look for solutions in suburban and semi-rural developments which frequently overlooked the desires and needs of the affected population.60 Furthermore, as Sheeran shows, gender was an important element in the new configuration of urban space, contemporaries viewing with trepidation the appearance of a female urban crowd in the streets and squares of the new textile towns of the early nineteenth-century Pennines, creating disquiet and raising issues about control and management of such a novel and potentially dangerous manifestation. Art, literature, popular culture and social investigation, were all employed to record and tame this new manifestation and restore some male order to the disrupted streets of the town.61

Modernity This contest for control of the urban sphere forms a major part of recent discussions around the impact of modernity on British life. The historiography of British modernity remains rather limited,62 although very important work has appeared on modernity and urbanity in Germany.63 That of McElligott raises some key questions for the study of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century city, especially around gender, consumption, youth, class, circulation, public health, leisure and the physical expansion and management of the city.64 Despite these areas being vital to British urban politics, historians have so far failed to come to terms with many of them, still tending to see modernity as synonymous with modernisation. Yet modernisation should be seen as a process – urbanisation, technological change, expansion of local and national government, rationalisation and planning – whilst modernity relates to how modern life was experienced by people, especially in the urban sphere, in the first half of the twentieth century. This neglect is unfortunate, as the British experience of urban modernity is both longer and more extensive than that of Germany, affecting the lives of the vast majority of the population by 1900. Discourses of modernity and the desire to deal with its manifestations are apparent in most aspects of urban politics in the nineteenth and twentieth century, whether in the expansion of policing, slum clearance policies, the control of leisure – both traditional and modern – or the restructuring of space. They should also be recognised in assessments of the cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the growing literature on the management of both crime and health policy, especially habitual offenders, inebriates and the mentally ill.65 These themes are touched upon directly by Bob Hayes, Shane Ewen, Geoff Timmins – and in a slightly different way by Tim

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Introduction

Cooper – although the challenges of modernity are implicit in all the issues discussed in this volume.

Cultural Politics These trends have generated a questioning of modernisation theory’s rejection of cultural influences and explanations in the shaping of urban politics.66 Most historians agree that culture was central to the politics of the nineteenth century city, with the result that much of the debate surrounding the decline of the Liberal party in the early twentieth century focused on the increasing dominance of class in determining political affiliation and behaviour.67 In recent years, however, the cultural turn in history has had some impact on the study of urban politics and the behaviour of elites. Historians, such as Joyce, Lawrence, Trainor, Doyle and Morris, although not all influenced by post-modernism, have recognised the significance of the cultural environment in which elite politics were formed, focusing on aspects such as associations, personal networks, residential patterns and business culture, to show that the culture of the middle class was far from uniform.68 Simon Gunn, in particular, has pointed to a range of cultural rituals and performances – funerals, promenades, processions – and their part in buttressing elite control of the urban. His approach suggests that these cultural activities served to solidify the middle class and middle-class identity, although he also provides evidence of enduring divisions around religion, occupation and party politics.69 Ritual and culture are also central to Lawrence’s analysis of Wolverhampton politics in the late nineteenth century, where Conservatives exploited Liberal attacks on working-class culture to their advantage,70 whilst older work by Joyce and Steadman Jones emphasised the importance of working-class culture to the shape of nineteenth-century urban politics.71 The chapters in this volume foreground the enduring significance of culture in two ways – by demonstrating how the culture of the municipality and the sub-region influenced routine political processes and by highlighting the manner in which history and tradition became a central plank in political discourses from the later nineteenth century onwards, especially in areas where rural and urban came into contact. Thus, Ewen and Nick Hayes demonstrate the importance of municipal identity and civic culture and their promotion by the local press, in defusing party antagonism in the course of routine council business, challenging orthodox views about the damaging nature of “party” in local government. Trainor draws on similar themes and ideas in his assessment of “Black Country” politics, showing how pride in the achievements of

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local men, irrespective of party, could be utilised to promote the idea of the district and to locate it within the midlands and the nation. Conversely, both Cooper and Shapley illustrate the way that ideas about the identity, history and heritage of a place could be employed by conservative opponents of urban development, especially around the large conurbations.

The Role of Party The articles in this collection also help to reinforce important revisions in the more traditional view of urban politics and space. They challenge the accepted wisdom that party became an increasing manifestation of and influence on the conduct of local politics. Although it is now accepted that party was deeply embedded in the politics of the larger boroughs from the early nineteenth century onwards,72 the influence of party in the day-today running of the municipality remains unclear.73 Thus, it has usually been assumed that the rise of Labour after 1900 led to a profound politicisation of the council chamber, with widespread and acrimonious conflict at all turns,74 yet, as both Ewen and Nick Hayes demonstrate, such analysis is simplistic. As with Liberal domination of the boroughs and the structures of municipal government (mayoralty, aldermanic bench, committee chairs) in the early nineteenth century, so the anti-socialist parties of the inter-war period did, initially, attempt to exclude Labour from power but as with their Liberal predecessors, such an approach was relatively short-lived and, in most cases, patronage and office were shared by the end of the 1930s.75 Similarly, in the field of policy formation and execution, party did not matter nearly as much as we have been led to believe, except in a few areas and even then the picture was by no means uniform. In areas like health, hospital provision and especially housing and policing, party was often unimportant, with economic prosperity, traditions of civic intervention and strength of local voluntary activity usually of far greater importance.76 Admittedly, party was very important at election times, when even nineteenth century campaigns could be vitriolic,77 whilst policy divisions did exist, especially over licensing in the nineteenth century or direct labour in the twentieth. Yet these observations notwithstanding, the fact remained that up to 90% of local government business was routine and non-controversial and that, in most towns and cities, civic culture was such that the good governance of the city overrode party antagonism.78 In such circumstances, the appearance of new groups challenging for power could often be incorporated into the civic apparatus, as long as they were willing to play by the established rules of the game

12

Introduction

(the persistence of civic ritual and civic regalia after both 1835 and 1935 being a case in point). Thus, the arrival of Labour was fairly easily accommodated whilst Labour, in turn, rarely abused power or rejected tradition as evidenced by the treatment of the Conservative Alderman George Poole in late 1930s Coventry. Conversely, the refusal of new political actors to “play by the rules” did lead to conflict, for example the failure of Barrow’s communists to incorporate in 1920, encouraged the established parties, including Labour, to pull together to restore acceptable boundaries of political behaviour.79

Policy Drivers The research in this volume also bolsters our growing awareness of the relative weakness of central government in determining policy in urban areas.80 Historians, like contemporaries, have often been critical of the permissive nature of much nineteenth and early twentieth-century local government legislation, seeing central intervention as a sign of quality control, equalisation and efficiency.81 Conversely, others have lamented the increasing control of Whitehall over the boroughs, regarding the nationalisation of local government as leading to a loss of local autonomy, rigid uniformity and the multiplication of bureaucracy.82 Recent research, however, confirmed by many of the papers in this collection, has shown that boroughs continued to maintain significant control over most important areas of policy until at least 1946. Even after that, how they met government directives in areas like housing, was usually left to the discretion of the council.83 In this context, it was the local municipal politicians and their officials who shaped policy.84 Undoubtedly, they could be constrained or even deadlocked by party conflict, especially when oppositional political groupings were finely balanced or where party control was unstable, as in Leeds in the early 1930s.85 They were more often constrained, not by visceral ideological battles, but by financial weakness, by strong pressure groups or by the presence of well-founded and entrenched competitors.86 Furthermore, as the contributions by Bob Hayes and Peter Shapely reveal, other local authorities could often prove the greatest stumbling block to the expansion of services, or as has been illustrated elsewhere, might themselves be the catalyst for reform.87 Moreover, the party system was often over-ridden by strong civic traditions of intervention inherited from the nineteenth century – seemingly the case in Birmingham and Liverpool – and by wider concerns to improve the urban fabric, sometimes stimulated by a local disaster, national emergency or even by civic

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boosterism.88 Nor were policies always the work of a single party. In the nineteenth century parties were often divided within themselves over the extent of their responsibilities whilst in the unstable world of the 1920s and early 1930s, alliances could be forged across party lines to push through reform.89

A British Progressivism? These alliances raise important questions about the social bases of reform and anti-reform coalitions throughout our period. As has been observed, we should not underestimate or denigrate the politics of the shopkeeper, the most consistent single group on councils throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor, as Nick Hayes makes clear in this collection, should we swallow pessimistic narratives about the declining quality of urban municipal governors. The reduced prominence of major manufacturers on borough councils from the mid-nineteenth century onwards is, indeed, indicative of a partial democratisation of the council chamber, but more importantly of the diversification of the elite in the light of the growing maturity of towns and cities and the more complex requirements of local government. Whilst Jacobin uprisings by small business as in Birmingham and elsewhere in the 1870s or Leeds in the 1890s, can be seen as a temporary triumph for small government and parish pump politics, the more significant trend in the thirty years before the First World War was the growth of professional representation on municipal bodies as families and firms diversified.90 Elite representation changed as professionals became integrated, socially and economically, with the business elite and as the demands and spoils of local governance became more applicable to the professional classes.91 It is conceivable that this marrying of big business and the professions produced a form of progressivism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England which mirrored developments in the United States’ urban sphere.92 Doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants and educationalists could all bring something to the management of the expanding areas of local governance, as well as seeing personal benefits.93 They could work together with the more powerful businessmen to shape the urban environment and manage the demands of modernity, such as urban expansion, the need to provide utilities and health services and to reshape the city in a more healthful and efficient manner.94 This desire for urban efficiency and the management of modernity often brought them into conflict with less wealthy businessmen and the representatives of other lower-middle-class groups, especially property-owners fearful of rising

14

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rates, interventions in daily life and municipal indebtedness.95 Furthermore, it could bring them closer to those on the Labour benches who sought the same ends, albeit for different reasons, although Labour members could also be found siding with conservative moralists on issues such as contraception, licensing policy or the Sunday opening of cinemas.96 Reform at a regional or sub-regional level could be held back by traditional conflicts between parties, for instance, Tory towns in Lancashire resisting attempts by the County Council to create county-wide institutions in the early twentieth century. But internal party division could also arise between local authorities, as was common in the nineteenth century and certainly remained evident well into the twentieth century, as Shapely’s contribution illustrates. Whether or not this group of businessmen and professionals who were promoting reform in the fifty years after 1880 were Progressives, in an American sense, it is clear that the challenges of the city in this period brought forward some important new responses, most of which came from within the traditional urban elite. Their discourse of modernity and their desire to control the excesses of the urban environment saw them implement a range of policies that drew their inspiration from an amalgam of traditional moralism and modern scientific and social scientific methods.97 These developments are most apparent in the chapters presented by Bob Hayes and Bill Luckin, who show how the work of the new scientific moralists underpinned housing policy and the drive for institutions, such as those for inebriates. Older fears about urban protection were given a modern gloss in the realm of policing and fire services, whilst Walthamstow’s brand of suburban progressivism was firmly rejected by traditional semi-rural elites who wished to limit, rather than embrace, modernity. The failure to recognise the importance of progressivism in English cities between 1880 and 1940 has arisen largely from the earlier fixation with class politics and a predominant, teleological discourse about the rise of Labour. This has led those historians who were willing to deal with progressivism to treat it as a brand of socialism, rather than a specific middle-class political response to the demands of the modern urban world.

Cities and Regions Whilst many new and interesting ideas are shaping the study of urban politics, historians have been less keen to explore the history of English regions. There is a growing awareness of the diversity of economic regions and the cultural traditions evoked by the dichotomy of north and

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south, although the ‘North’ is usually Yorkshire and Lancashire,98 the ‘South’ is the Home Counties, with the Midlands, the North East and the South West, as well as the capital cities of London, Edinburgh and Cardiff, fitting less easily into such a simple model. Some cities very clearly do form the core of regions – Newcastle, Glasgow and Birmingham incontrovertibly do99 – but urban historians of the modern period have tended to overlook this or have continued to isolate towns from their hinterlands, employing the city as the symbol of modernity in contrast to rural traditionalism.100 In part, this situation is a result of the move away from regional/county affiliations of towns and their elites. Many institutions of the late nineteenth century eschewed the traditional ‘City and County’ nomenclatures, whilst few adopted modern regional identities (Teesside, Clydeside) until well into the twentieth century. Similarly, historians have tended to study towns in isolation and respect the borders they set for themselves (a trend reinforced by the current popularity for ‘urban biographies’).101 More often than not, towns and cities have been set up in opposition to the surrounding countryside whilst elite figures who moved beyond the city boundaries are usually presented as ‘withdrawing’ from urban life, making a cultural, political and social statement about their rejection of urban modernity and civic and economic engagement.102 Similarly, urban elite figures who adopted roles beyond the city boundary were usually characterised as moving to a national level, by-passing any extant or possible regional role.103 On the other hand, attempts to recover or shape a regional identity were usually the work of traditionalists and set up in opposition to the influence of the dominating town or city.104 The Victorian and early twentieth century city, however, was more regional than this history suggests. Economically, most major towns and cities were linked with each other and with their hinterlands; some as markets, some as production centres, others, especially in the southern half of England, acting as both.105 Suburbanisation and counter-urbanisation took the city into the country, or to abut or co-mingle with adjoining places, which created sub-regions, such as Teesside, Tyneside and Merseyside.106 Most importantly, central places, especially what we might term the regional metropolises, impacted upon their hinterland through a range of deliberate and unintended actions which saw their influence spill out beyond the municipal boundaries that have constructed the work of most urban historians. In the process, they created a form of regional politics on an ad hoc basis with constantly shifting alliances cutting across conventional social, political and party lines. As the period under examination proceeded, more formal structures and institutions did emerge to address regional issues. The 1888 County Councils Act unified much of

16

Introduction

London, sealed the boundaries of the large towns, while greatly increasing their power and provided the counties with recognised authority, structures and bureaucracies.107 In some important areas, joint boards appeared, especially for the management of waterways (for example the Tees Conservancy Commission) and for the building of bridges and tunnels (Mersey Tunnel, Newport Bridge over the Tees). Regional and subregional structures were increasingly created by Whitehall to address problems of unemployment and economic regeneration, whilst central government began to think ‘regionally’, at least in part, in the way they constructed statistics.108 Yet political regionalism remained weak, as John Davis has shown, and when regions became the basis for the management of much of the post-war utility structure, it was not on a democratic but a bureaucratic basis.109 Despite the absence of democratic, representative regional politics in the period, it is clear that urban centres had very important consequences for their hinterlands which could be both beneficial and damaging, as a number of the articles in this collection demonstrate. As towns and cities grew in the nineteenth century and matured in the twentieth, their physical presence and activity affected the surrounding countryside, first drawing in local populations as migrants (very significant in the case of Middlesbrough), then pushing out people in an endless process of suburbanisation and counter-urbanisation.110 Towns drew in resources and produced not just goods and services, but also pollutants, often in vast quantities. Air and water were affected to the detriment of neighbouring populations, sewerage created and dumped, while industry, as well as housing, frequently encroached upon the open spaces, especially along roads and rivers.111 As Tim Cooper shows, the regional impact of London and the way its population swelled and spilled out into Essex, created social, political and cultural conflicts between the city and its hinterland. Nor did greater regulation prevent such clashes as, ironically, the age of planning actually increased the predatory scope of the big city as planners envisaged zones in which industry, housing, retailing and services and even transport networks would operate over a regional or sub-regional level.112 Cities were encouraged to think regionally, as is shown by Peter Shapely in his enlightening essay on Manchester’s attempts to plant new estates in South Lancashire and Cheshire, in both cases producing spirited defence from local populations, irrespective of party or social class. Urban centres could also become involved, politically, in their regions and sub-regions, most obviously in the case of incorporation, where towns and cities attempted to bring in suburbs and villages, a process that often met with significant opposition from the outlying areas.113 Alternatively,

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the distribution of governance and institutional controls could lead to important political developments. In the case of policing, Chris Williams has contended that it was the fear of falling under the police control of the county that encouraged Sheffield to seek incorporated status in the late 1830s.114 On the other hand, the attempt by Manchester to build estates in Cheshire and keep the revenue accrued for the City, was a clear case of political interference.115 Towns could also have an impact on the environment of their hinterlands. In the case of municipal water supply big cities, like Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow built large reservoirs in Wales, the Lake District and the Trossachs which impacted on the rural environment both positively, in terms of improving water supplies, but also negatively, in their physical, social and economic reshaping of the area. Similarly, cities and their local authorities gradually expanded their utility services, sometimes outwith the boundaries of the urban area – though legislation could be used to limit this, as in the case of electricity supply in the early twentieth century.116 Certainly there were many local and national groups opposing the expansionist ambitions of the big cities, especially other medium-sized towns, yet despite this, there were moves to create regional responses to some problems of the twentieth century, especially in the area of health-care provision. Specialist hospital care, such as that for infectious diseases, was increasingly centralised in the big cities, a process that, in turn, reinforced their power by attracting the best doctors and encouraging the appearance of other specialist and technical services. Even quite large sub-regional cities could be put in the shadow Leicester remaining dependent on Sheffield, Middlesbrough on Newcastle and Preston on Manchester.117 This power fed into the NHS, which was set up with Regional Health Boards based on existing regional specialist centres. Health policy also encouraged a regional approach to the treatment and management of mental health and other behavioural problems identified at the end of the nineteenth century. This is shown very clearly in the chapter by Bob Hayes, which discusses the attempts to create provision for inebriates on a Lancashire-wide basis, highlighting the degree of independence displayed by the many urban areas in the county. Urban regionalism, furthermore, was increasingly apparent at a virtual level with the development of the morning regional press, usually, though not always, based in the regional metropolis. Newspapers, like the Eastern Daily Press in Norwich, the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald and the London Evening Standard creating an idea of the region in the minds of the readership whilst implicitly placing the city at the centre. This wasn’t always the case, particularly with the Darlington-based Northern Echo and the ambiguously positioned Yorkshire Post, yet overall, unlike the highly

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parochial evening newspapers which largely served the urban area, these morning dailies, with their high circulations, helped to shape a shadow regional identity which recognised the growing importance of cities as the centre for ideas, services, consumption and political leadership.118 Regional networks of businessmen, urban professionals, local politicians and specialists served to reinforce this soft regionalism based on the city. Meeting to exchange ideas and best practice, to copy, to show off, even to distribute resources, these regional networks became more formal and sophisticated as the twentieth century progressed.119 Moreover, they reflected the extent to which towns had escaped their boundaries physically, economically and socially, yet in a way that was scarcely reflected in the political structures available to urban leaders. This search for some form of regional voice is reflected in Rick Trainor’s chapter which highlights the way MPs from within the Black Country could bury their severe political disagreements to present a united face to the outside world. This collection illustrates both the positive steps towards a regional political culture120 and the barriers experienced while attempting to provide services at a scale greater than the town or to expand the influence of the conurbation to a regional plane.

Conclusion Together, the chapters in this volume begin a process of uniting political, spatial and regional perspectives in the writing of urban history. To address these issues, the book is divided into three sections: The Structures of Politics; Politics, Institutions and Urban Management; and Governance, Discourses and Space. In the first, Rick Trainor and Nick Hayes explore the sites of conflict and compromise in urban politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Class, party and locality all provided arenas for, sometimes violent, battles over political legitimacy, resource distribution and leadership. Yet they could equally be submerged when broader issues of civic or regional interest dominated. Moreover, as suggested in the chapters of section two, by Shane Ewen, Bob Hayes and Peter Shapely, locality could be a powerful factor in the resistance to expanding local state power. Party, even class, interest could be suspended to defend the town from the predatory expansion of the regional metropolis or the ‘joint board’. The persistence of such localism, even in the era of the centralised welfare state, raises important questions about the effectiveness of planning, rationality and scale in the organisation and delivery of services. Section three examines the importance of space, place and discourse in expanding and managing the challenges of urban

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modernity in the period under review. The essays by Geoff Timmins, Bill Luckin, George Sheeran and Timothy Cooper, are all concerned with the way that language was employed to established social problems and thus to find their solution. Space was not only managed with police, but also with words, which valorised and condemned physical environments and social practices, feeding back, as Peter Shapely demonstrates, into political action. Overall, these essays make an important contribution to revising how we approach key issues in the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth-century city, bringing party, place and region together to challenge well-established views about the dominance of party and the weakness of region in modern England. 1

There are extensive recent discussions of this literature in B.M. Doyle, “The Changing Functions of Urban Government: Councillors, Officials and Pressure Groups”, in M. Daunton ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 3, 1830-1950 (Cambridge, 2000); R.H. Trainor, “The ‘Decline’ of British Urban Governance since 1850: A Reassessment”, in R.J. Morris and R.H. Trainor eds., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000); J. Smith “Urban Elites c. 1830–1930 and Urban History”, Urban History 27 (2000), 25575; J. Garrard, “Urban Elites, 1850-1914: The Rule and Decline of a New Squirearchy?” Albion 27 (1995), 583-621; and S. Gunn, “Class, Identity and the Urban: The Middle Class in England, 1800-1950”, Urban History 31 (2004), 1-19. 2 S. Gunn and R. J. Morris eds., Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot, 2001). 3 A. Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation In Three Cities 18701914 (Leicester, 1993) and B.M. Doyle, “Mapping Slums in a Historic City: Representing Working-class Communities in Edwardian Norwich”, Planning Perspectives 16 (2001), 47-65. 4 P. Hudson, Regions and Industries: A Perspective on Britain’s Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1989); G. Gordon ed., Regional Cities in the UK, 18901980 (London, 1986). 5 For the most comprehensive bibliography relating to urban history see R. Rodger, ed., European Urban History: Prospect and Retrospect (Leicester, 1993) and Urban History, 1992 onwards which contains an annual bibliography. 6 C. Applegate, “A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Subnational Places in Modern Times”, American Historical Review 104 (1999), 11571182. 7 J. Davis, “Central Government and the Towns”, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 279-80. 8 R. Colls and B. Lancaster eds., Newcastle: A Modern History (Chichester, 2001); J. Belchem, Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism (Liverpool, 2000); W. H. Fraser and I. Maver eds., Glasgow, Volume II: 1830-1912 (Manchester, 1996).

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Introduction

K. Laybourn, “The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate”, History 80 (1995), 207-26. 10 D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester, 1976); P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). 11 J. Bulpitt, Party Politics in English Local Government (London, 1967); L.J. Sharpe, “Elected Representatives in Local Government”, British Journal of Sociology 13 (1962), 189-208. 12 This is central to Clarke, New Liberalism; D.W. Bebbington, “Nonconformity and Electoral Sociology, 1867-1918”, Historical Journal 27 (1984), 636-56; R. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910-24 (Oxford, 1974). 13 C. Cook, “Labour and the Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1906-14” in A. Sked and C. Cook eds., Crisis and Controversy (London, 1976), 38-65; C. Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922-1929 (London and Basingstoke, 1975); K. Laybourn and J. Reynolds, Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, 1890-1918 (London, 1984). For a recent revisionist assessment see, J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, “Introduction: Electoral Sociology and the Historians”, in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997). 14 An early example of this comes from Asa Briggs’ discussion of Middlesbrough in A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Pelican ed., 1968), 258. 15 P.J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1868-1939 (Liverpool, 1981). Glasgow is an interesting contradiction, capable of expressing both class and cultural politics throughout the inter-war period. For class see, for example, A. McKinlay and R. J. Morris eds., The ILP on Clydeside, 1893-1932: From Foundation to Disintegration (Manchester, 1991) and for cultural politics, T. Gallagher, Glasgow, The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Glasgow (Manchester, 1987). 16 J. Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns, 1830-80 (Manchester, 1983); Fraser, Power and Authority; D.Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 1990); K. Young, Local Politics and the Rise of Party: The London Municipal Society and the Conservative Intervention in Local Elections, 1894-1963 (Leicester, 1975); P. F. Clarke, “The end of Laissezfaire and the Politics of Cotton”, Historical Journal 15 (1972), 493-512; H.E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870-1914 (London, 1976); S. Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, (London, 1976); J.M. Lee, Social Leaders and Public Persons: A Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888, (Oxford, 1963). For a sustained critique of Lee see Trainor, “Decline” and Nick Hayes’ contribution below. 17 Especially Cook, Age of Alignment and Laybourn and Reynolds, Rise of Labour. For more sophisticated readings of Labour’s early years see T. Adams, “Labour and the First World War: Economy, Politics and the Erosion of Local Peculiarity?” Journal of Regional and Local Studies 10 (1990), 23-47.

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21

A good example of the middle class as “voices off” in early twentieth century political change can be found in the otherwise very perceptive M. Savage, The Dynamics of Working Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 18801940 (Cambridge, 1987). 19 P. Harling, “Equipoise Regained? Recent trends in British Political History, 1790-1867” Journal of Modern History 75 (2003), 909-16. See also P. Hollis ed., Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974) and P. Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914 (Oxford, 1987). 20 P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (London, 1980); R.H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrial Area, 1830-1900 (Oxford, 1993). 21 A.J. Kidd and D. Nicholls eds., The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1998). 22 Morris and Trainor, Urban Governance; S. Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 18401914 (Manchester, 2000). 23 G. Crossick and H.-G. Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780-1914 (London, 1995). 24 H.J. Dyos ed., The Study of Urban History (London, 1967); H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff eds., The Victorian City: Images and Realities 2 Vols. (London, 1973); R.J. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge, 1984). 25 B.M. Doyle, “Urban Liberalism and the ‘Lost Generation’: Politics and Middle Class Culture in Norwich, 1900-1935”, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 617-634; J. Moore, “Liberalism and the Politics of Suburbia: Electoral Dynamics in late Nineteenth-century South Manchester”, Urban History 30 (2003), 225-250. 26 The standard work on housing in this period is J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815-1985 (London, 2nd Ed. 1986) and the best introduction to the literature on planning, H. Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1997). 27 M. Daunton, “Payment and Participation: Welfare and State Formation in Britain, 1990-1951” Past and Present 150 (1996), 169-216. 28 J. Garrard, “Local Power in Britain at the End of the Nineteenth Century” University of Salford Occasional Papers in Politics and Contemporary History No. 29 (n.d. [1992]); Doyle, “Urban Government”. 29 K. Cowman, Mrs Brown is a Man and a Brother! Women in Merseyside’s Political Organisations 1890 – 1920 (Liverpool, 2004); Hollis, Ladies Elect. 30 M. Savage, “The Rise of the Labour Party in Local Perspective”, Journal of Regional and Local Studies 10 (1990), 12. 31 L. Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London (London and New Haven, 2000); L. Nead and F. Mort eds., Sexual Geographies (London, 1999); J. R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992); K.

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Cowman, “The Battle of the Boulevards: Class, Gender and the Purpose of Public Space in later Victorian Liverpool” in Gunn & Morris, Identities in Space, 152-64. 32 B.M. Doyle, “The Structure of Elite Power in the Early Twentieth-century City: Norwich, 1900-35”, Urban History, 24 (1997), 179-99; J. Hinton, Women, Social Leadership, and the Second World War: Continuities of Class (Oxford, 2003). 33 M. Savage, “Urban History and Social Class: Two Paradigms”, Urban History 20 (1993), 72-6. 34 R.J. Morris, “A Year in the Public Life of the British Bourgeoisie” in R. Colls and R. Rodger eds., Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain 1800-2000. Essays in Honour of David Reeder (Aldershot, 2004), 121-143. See also the “Civil Society” special issue of Urban History 25 (1998). 35 Dupree, “Social Services”; M. Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy: Charity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Bristol, (Woodbridge, 1999). 36 H. McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914 (Basingstoke, 1996); M. J. D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge, 2004); Morris & Trainor, Urban Governance; Miles and Savage, Remaking the Working Class. 37 “Norwich District Visiting Society, Report of the Committee for 1903”, (Norwich, 1903); Norwich District Visiting Society, Annual Report, 1935. 38 K. Laybourn, “The Guild of Help and the Changing Face of Edwardian Philanthropy”, Urban History 20 (1993), 43-60; G. Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain, 1730-1990 (Oxford, 1994); Daunton, “Payment and Participation”; S. Cherry, “Before the National Health Service: Financing the Voluntary Hospitals, 1900-1939”, Economic History Review, 50 (1997), 309-27; D. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660-1960 (Oxford, 1965). 39 F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in nineteenth Century England (Oxford, 1980); Hinton, Women and Social Leadership; B S. Rowntree English Life and Leisure: A Social Study (London, 1951); McKibbin, Classes and Cultures. 40 Savage and Miles, Remaking of the Working Class, 67-8; B. Doyle, A History of Hospitals in Middlesbrough (Middlesbrough, 2002). 41 For a local example based on Leicester see J. Welshman, Municipal Medicine: Public Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2000). 42 For a more extensive discussion of these themes see the essay by Nick Hayes below. 43 M. J Winstanley, The Shopkeeper's World, 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983); P. Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, c.1870-1930 (Manchester, 1996); Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth Century Europe, ed. G. Crossick & H.-G. Haupt (London, 1984); and S. Kroen, “Historiographical Review: A Political History of the Consumer”, Historical Journal 47 (2004), 709-736. 44 W.H. Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850-1914 (London, 1981); J. Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980 (London, 1994); J.

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Walton, “Towns and Consumerism”, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 71544; B. Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London, 1995). 45 J. Southern, “Co-operation in the North West of England, 1919-1939: Stronghold or Stagnation?”, Journal of Regional and Local Studies 13 (1993); Gurney, Cooperative Culture. 46 M. French and J. Phillips, Cheated Not Poisoned: Food Regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875-1938 (Manchester, 2000). 47 Hilton, Consumerism; M. Daunton and M. Hilton eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001); F. Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption”, Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004), 373-401. 48 B.M. Doyle, “Rehabilitating the Retailer: Shopkeepers in Urban Government 1900-1950” in S. Couperus, C. Smit and D.J. Wolffram eds., Changing Times: Elites and the Dynamics of Local Politics (Leuven, 2007). 49 D. Reeder and R. Rodger, “Industrialisation and the City Economy” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 553-92. 50 D. Taylor, “The Infant Hercules and the Augean Stables: A Century of Economic and Social Development in Middlesbrough, c.1840-1939”, in Pollard, Middlesbrough, 53-80. See also Doyle, “Rehabilitating the Retailer”. 51 For the physical changes that accompanied these developments see P. Scott, “The Evolution of Britain’s Urban Built Environment” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 495-524. 52 Crossick and Haupt, Petite Bourgeoisie, ch. 7 and 223-230 which is concerned primarily with far-right politics in France, Germany, Italy and Belgium and makes few references to Britain. Winstanley, World of the Shopkeeper, 75-80. 53 N. Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, Affluence and Labour Politics: Coventry 1945-60 (London, 1990);. For a detailed contemporary discussion of the problem of retailing in Middlesbrough see R. Glass, The Social Background of a Plan: A Study of Middlesbrough, (London, 1948). 54 G.W. Jones, Borough Politics: A Study of the Wolverhampton Borough Council, 1888-1964, (London, 1969), 134-5. 55 For example, G.L. Bernstein, Liberalism and Liberal Politics in Edwardian England (London, 1986); Tanner, Political Change. 56 Gunn and Morris, Identities in Space especially S. Gunn “The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place”, 1-14. 57 N. Canefe, “One Cyprus or Many? Turkish Cypriot History in Nicosia”, 60-78 and Cowman, “Battle of the Boulevards” in Gunn and Morris, Identities in Space, 152-64. 58 Mayne, Imagined Slum; Doyle, “Mapping Slums”; A. McElligott, The German Urban Experience, 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (London, 2001). 59 In addition to the articles in this volume and their notes, see also N. Hayes, “Two Tales of the City? Probing Urban and Architectural History”, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002), 665-74.

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Introduction

For a revision that suggests that public support for suburban living was very strong, see M. Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the United States, (Oxford, 2003). 61 M. Harrison Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns 1790 1835, (Cambridge, 1988); D. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, 1890–1940 (Aldershot, 2004). 62 M. Nava and A. O'Shea eds., Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London, 1996); M. Daunton and B. Rieger eds., Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001); B. Conekin, F. Mort, C. Waters eds., Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964 (London, 1999). 63 McElligott, German Urban Experience. 64 But see also Daunton’s introduction to Cambridge Urban History Vol.3, 1-58, which recognises many of these themes in relation to the nineteenth century city. 65 S. Petrow, Policing Morals: the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 18701914 (Oxford, 1994); J. Lawrence, “Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880-1914” English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 629-52., Mayne, Imagined Slum. 66 Lawrence “Political History”. 67 Laybourn, “State of the Debate”; Bernstein, Liberal Politics. 68 Joyce, Work, Society and Politics; J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (Cambridge, 1998); Trainor, Black Country Elites; Trainor, “Decline”; Doyle, “Structure of Elite Power”; Morris, Class, Sect and Party. 69 Gunn, Public Culture. 70 Lawrence, “Urban Toryism”. 71 G.S. Jones, “Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics” in G.S. Jones, The Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1984); Joyce, Work, Society and Politics. 72 J. A Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour 1818-41 (Oxford, 1992); P. Salmon, “Local Politics and Partisanship: The Electoral Impact of Municipal Reform, 1835”, Parliamentary History 20 (2000), 357-76. 73 Fraser, Urban Politics, 146; E.P. Hennock, “The Social Compositions of Borough Councils in Two Large Cities, 1835-1914”, in H.J. Dyos ed., The Study of Urban History (London, 1968), 322-3. 74 Laybourn, “Rise of Labour”; G. L. Bernstein, “Liberalism and the Progressive Alliance in the Constituencies, 1900-1914: Three Case Studies” Historical Journal 26 (1983), 618-40; T. Willis “Politics, Ideology and the Governance of Health Care in Sheffield before the NHS”, in Morris & Trainor, Urban Governance, 12849. 75 For the example of Norwich in both the early nineteenth century and the 1920s see Doyle, “Politics in Norwich”.

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25

For health policy see Powell, “Did Politics Matter” and A. Levene, M. Powell and J. Stewart “The Development of Municipal Hospital Care in English County Boroughs in the 1930s”, Medical History 50 (2006), 3-27. N. Hayes, “Civic Perceptions: Housing and Local Decision-making in English cities in the 1920s”, Urban History, 27 (2000), 211-33; S. Ewen, “Power and Administration in two Midland Cities, c.1870-1938” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 2003). 77 See Trainor below and Black Country Elites; Doyle, “Politics in Norwich”. 78 This is the argument of Nick Hayes in particular, see Hayes, “Civic Perceptions” and chapter below. 79 For the incorporation of Conservatives and the maintenance of civic regalia after 1835 in Norwich see Doyle, “Politics in Norwich” and more generally Fraser, Urban Politics and Power and Authority. Richardson, Twentieth Century Coventry, p. 186; C. Joy, “Labour Divided: Political Divisions and their Consequences in Barrow-in-Furness, 1921-1924” unpublished paper, Urban History Group meeting, Reassessing Urban Politics, Durham, 2003. 80 Doyle, “Urban Government” and Davis, “Central Government and the Towns”. 81 This is particularly the case with medicine. See for example Mohan, Planning, Markets and Hospitals. 82 For a variety of critical approaches to the “nationalising” of public services see the essays in Colls & Rodger, Cities of Ideas. 83 A.G.V. Simonds, “Conservative Governments and the New Town Housing Question in the 1950s”, Urban History 28 (2001), 65-83; Hayes, “Civic Perceptions”. 84 Doyle, “Urban Government”; M. Dagenais, I. Maver and P.-Y. Saunier eds., Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City: New Historic Approaches (Aldershot, 2003); J. Moore and R. Rodger, “Municipal Knowledge and Policy Networks in British Local Government”, Yearbook of European Administrative History, 15 (2003), 29-57. 85 Levene, Powell and Stewart “Municipal Medicine”. 86 This seems to account for much of the disparity in spending on hospitals in 1930s England. See Stewart, Levene and Powell, “Municipal medicine” for the general picture and B. M Doyle, “Competition and Cooperation in Hospital Provision in Middlesbrough, 1918-48” Medical History (2007). 87 C. Hamlin, “Muddling in Bumbledom: On the Enormity of Large Sanitary Improvements in Four British Towns, 1855-1885”, Victorian Studies, 32 (1988), 63; Moore, “Liberalism and the Politics of Suburbia”. 88 Mayne, Imagined Slum; P. J. Larkham and K. D. Lilley, “Plans, Planners and City Images: Place Promotion and Civic Boosterism in British Reconstruction Planning”, Urban History 30 (2003), 183-205. 89 Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, e.g. 31-7; L.J. Jones, “Public Pursuit of Private Profit? Liberal Businessmen and Municipal Politics in Birmingham, 18651900”, Business History 25 (1983), 240-263; Doyle, “Structure of Elite Power”. 90 Doyle, “Urban Government”, 298-300.

26

91

Introduction

Meller, Leisure, 85-95; Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 40-46. Moore, “Liberalism and the Politics of Suburbia”; M. H Ebner and E. M. Tobin eds., The Age of Urban Reform: New Perspectives on the Progressive Era (Port Washington, NY, 1977). 93 These groups could appear either as elected politicians, as municipal employees or consultants. Dagenais et al, Municipal Services. 94 B.M. Doyle, “Modernity or Morality? George White, Liberalism and the Nonconformist Conscience in Edwardian England” Historical Research, 71 (1998), 324-40; Jones, “Public Pursuit”. 95 Crossick and Haupt, Petite Bourgeoisie, 126-32. Moore argues this case is over stated, “Liberalism and the Politics of Suburbia”. 96 Doyle, “Structure of Elite Power”, 196-8; Jones, Borough Politics, 141; S.G. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918-1939, (London, 1987). 97 M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1986 reprint with corrections); Petrow, Policing Morals; Moore, “Liberalism and the Politics of Suburbia”. 98 H. M. Jewell, The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester, 1994); E. Royle ed., Issues of Regional Identity: In Honour of John Marshall (Manchester, 1998); D. Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester, 2004). 99 Colls and Lancaster, Newcastle; Fraser and Maver, Glasgow, Volume II: 18301912; A. Briggs, History of Birmingham 1865-1938 (London, 1952); Gordon, Regional Cities. 100 There is, for example, nothing on regions and urbanity in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History Vol.3, although there is in vol.2: J. Walton “The north”, in P. Clark ed., Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2000). See also F.M.L. Thompson ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain Vol.1 (Cambridge, 1990) which is devoted to regions. 101 D. Reeder, “The Industrial City in Britain: Urban Biography in the Modern Style”, Urban History 25 (1998), 368-78 and R.J. Morris, “Urban Biography: Scotland, 1700-2000”, Urban History 29 (2002), 276-283. 102 M. J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 18501980 (Harmondsworth, 1985: First published 1981). For a contrary position that challenges the “withdrawal” thesis, Trainor, “Decline”. 103 Rubinstein, “Britain’s Elites”; Gunn, Public Culture, epilogue. 104 P. Mandler “Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Sixth Series 7 (1998). 105 Rawcliffe and Wilson, Norwich Vol.2; P. Ollerenshaw and M. Dresser eds., The Making of Modern Bristol (Tiverton, 1996); Hudson, Regions and Industries. 106 S.D. Adshead, The South Tees-Side Regional Planning Scheme: A Report (1925); A. Holt ed., Merseyside: A Handbook to Liverpool and District Prepared on the Occasion of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Liverpool, September, 1923 (Liverpool & London, 1923). 92

Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Regional Perspectives

107

27

Davis, “Central Government and the Towns”. J. Mohan, “The Neglected Roots of Regionalism? The Commissioners for the Special Areas and Grants to Hospitals in England”, Social History of Medicine, 10 (1997), 243-62. 109 Davis, “Central Government and the Towns”; Mohan, Planning, Markets and Hospitals. 110 F.M.L. Thompson ed., The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester, 1982). 111 Garrard, “Urban Squirearchy”; A. Woebse, “The Environmental History of Middlesbrough”, Cleveland History 68 (1995). 112 J. Leonard, “‘City Beautiful’: Planning the Future in Mid-twentieth-century Middlesbrough”, in Pollard, Middlesbrough, 188; M. Lock ed., Middlesbrough Survey and Plan (Middlesbrough, 1946). 113 However, see Jones, Borough Politics, 207-10 for a middle class ward campaigning for incorporation into Wolverhampton. 114 C. Williams, “Expediency, Authority and Duplicity: Reforming Sheffield’s Police, 1832-40” in Morris and Trainor, Urban Governance, 115-27. 115 See Shapley below. 116 R. Roberts, “Business, Politics and Municipal Socialism”, J. Turner ed., Businessmen and Politics: Studies of Business Activity in British Politics,19001945 (London, 1984), 20-32. 117 Welshman, Municipal Medicine; Doyle, Hospitals in Middlesbrough; Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society. 118 M. Bromley and N. Hayes, “Campaigner, Watchdog or Municipal Lackey? Reflections on the Inter-war Provincial Press, Local Identity and Civic Welfarism”, Media History, 8 (2002), 197-212. 119 Moore and Rodger, “Municipal Knowledge”; Dagenais et al, Municipal Services. 120 Tanner, Political Change; S. Berger, “The Decline of Liberalism and the Rise of Labour: The Regional Approach”, Parliamentary History 12 (1993), 84-92. 108

PART I: THE STRUCTURES OF POLITICS

CHAPTER ONE CONFLICT, COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY IN VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN URBAN POLITICS: A CASE STUDY OF THE BLACK COUNTRY RICHARD TRAINOR1

Introduction There are many varieties of urban history. Implicitly or explicitly, politics – understood as the broad range of activities and processes related to government power – has usually been central to most of them.2 Yet a renewed emphasis on urban politics is very timely. In recent years, in the midst of other urban history enthusiasms such as civil society and culture, politics has sometimes been in danger of being obscured. Moreover, urban history needs to “take on board” the work of a new generation of political historians who have diverged sharply from the old “high politics”, from which earlier urban historians decisively distanced themselves. In recent years, scholars such as Eugenio Biagini, Jon Lawrence, Alastair Reid, Duncan Tanner and Miles Taylor have argued convincingly that the mechanisms and rituals of politics should neither be taken for granted, nor assumed to be mainly about class, even in a modern industrial society such as Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Likewise, despite the renewed emphasis on consensus, elites and governance,4 recent work in political history reminds urban historians that they must remain sensitive to conflict and to its frequent proximate cause, insurgency. Urban historians, however, need not be defensive about recent writing in political history. Urban history – whether in the 1960s, 1970s, or more recently – has rarely either ignored politics, or assumed that it simply reflected changes in economic and social structures. For example, a number of multi-themed urban studies focusing on nineteenth century elites and the middle classes from whom they were largely drawn – works

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31

little featured in the recent spate of political history studies – emphasise the importance of particular individuals, party organisations and groups of voters in the context of broad changes in urban economies, societies and cultures. Thus, rounded urban history with its acute sensitivity to particular places, people and organisations,5 remains well placed to learn from the latest generation of political historians - understandably focused on the evolution of political parties - while supplementing these colleagues’ insights with broadly-based understandings of urban change. This essay uses the Victorian and Edwardian ‘Black Country’ (see Map) as a case study of the role of politics in relation to both conflict and community, key themes and processes in nineteenth and early twentieth century British urban history. The essay looks, first, at how politics expressed major urban conflicts, then, secondly, at how politics shaped the definition of urban community itself. Both these processes were notable features of the Black Country, between the 1830s and the 1910s. These were decades when the region experienced rapid industrial and demographic growth, followed by relative stagnation, then pre-war revival. In terms of urban structure, these were years when the hamlets of the early nineteenth century coalesced into small-to-medium-sized towns (see Map) and, increasingly, a district with ever-firmer links to the overall West Midlands region and beyond.6 These economic, demographic and urban trends contributed to, and reflected, considerable social complexity. The district included an active local aristocracy, a substantial and expanding middle class, modest ethnic diversity through the Irish and Welsh and a complicated pattern of religious allegiance featuring vibrant old and new Dissent plus a sizeable Anglican minority.7 Unsurprisingly, there was much contention in the area during the period including: ‘plug plot’ riots in 1842; persistent church rate disputes; major confrontations in the iron and coal industries concerning wages; battles about religious influence over education; ratepayers’ revolts; and lively scuffles on a myriad of topics including temperance and ritualism. There was also a considerable variety of partisan allegiance; Liberals, Conservatives, Liberal Unionists, though only belatedly and to a lesser extent Labour, were strongly competitive.8

32

Chapter One

Map 1: The Black Country and its Vicinity in the Later Nineteenth Century. Source: R. H. Trainer, ‘Peers on an Industrial Frontier The Earls of Dartmouth and of Dudley in the Black County c. 1810-1914’, in D. N. Cannadine, ed., Patricians, Power and Politics in Nineteenth Century Towns (Leicester, 1982).

Conflict The society and political institutions of the modern Black Country developed together from the early nineteenth century. As a result, elections and the parties that had increasingly important roles in them, played major

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33

parts in the emergence of rival groups and ideologies, as the towns’ previously primitive political infrastructure developed rapidly from the 1830s. Dudley, Wolverhampton and Walsall acquired their own MPs from 1832. From that date, the Black Country also began to play an increasingly significant role in the party associations and elections of the relevant county seats, in Staffordshire and Worcestershire. As Table 1.1 shows, although municipal incorporation came late (except in Walsall) – Wolverhampton in 1848, Dudley in 1865, West Bromwich in 1882 – from the outset of the period the district had its share of other elected local government bodies, including, of course, Poor Law Unions. Meanwhile, the area acquired additional parliamentary seats in the 1860s and, especially, the 1880s. At the same time, the sporadic party associations of the 1830s and 1840s, often led by county grandees and their urban counterparts, gave way after 1867 to the Black Country’s version of lively local affiliates of the rapidly developing national party networks, complete with well-attended meetings, auxiliary associations, political clubs and affiliated newspapers.9 At first, only a restricted proportion of the population was eligible to participate formally in these institutions, either as electors or, even more so, as representatives or functionaries. In the Black Country, as elsewhere, women were excluded, although later in the period they had a limited role in municipal elections and as Poor Law guardians and school board members. Likewise, for males the property restrictions of the parliamentary and municipal franchises in the middle third of the century hit hard in the Black Country, especially on the district’s manual workers. In Dudley in the early 1860s, only about 9% of the adult males could vote in county parliamentary elections (12% in borough parliamentary contests). Only about a fifth of the Black-Countrymen on the parliamentary electoral roll at that time were manual workers, despite the latter’s strong preponderance in the population as a whole.10 Nor was the Black Country immune from the tendency for parliamentary elections to be frequently uncontested, with party associations correspondingly moribund.

34

Chapter One

Conflict, Community and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Urban Politics: A Case Study of the Black Country

35

However, as political historians such as John Phillips and Philip Salmon have revealed for the country as a whole, the post-1832 political system in the district was more lively than its formal features suggest.11 In these Black Country towns, even the restricted franchises introduced in the 1830s brought into the process many middle-class people who, previously, had fewer and less prestigious outlets for their views. This mattered because, in the Black Country as in other areas, many (arguably most) of the key political disputes of the period between the 1830s and 1880s were largely battles between middle-class-led factions, rather than being more broadly-based struggles. The campaigns to enlarge the franchise and to introduce incorporation also livened up the political process, mobilising many of those who were formally excluded. In other ways, too, Black Country people who were formally outside these institutions nonetheless played a major part in public affairs. Thus, by the later nineteenth century the women’s organisations affiliated to the main political parties were very active in the area, notably in canvassing. For males, quite apart from occasional electoral riots and broadly-based political demonstrations, the rituals surrounding elections provided, as Frank O’Gorman has pointed out, a limited but significant role for the whole community, even before 1867.12 Also, while formal leadership of local party associations fell mainly to the aristocracy and the upper-middle class, a wider range of middle-class individuals (such as the Dudley auctioneer, David Howat) held positions of effective influence.13 Furthermore, even in that early part of the period, the Black Country’s political institutions were flexible enough to allow a significant proportion and social range of the population to participate formally in local elections and, to a lesser extent, local representation. As Table 1.2 reveals, in an area with many lower-middle-class and even working-class house owners and substantial occupiers, a significant proportion of the male population, extending into the working class, was able to vote for guardians and (in some cases) for the more open of the district’s boards and commissions. In the Black Country, as elsewhere, the school boards, and from the 1880s the borough councils, followed suit. By the late nineteenth century, there was also a drastic widening of the parliamentary franchise.14

Chapter One

36

TABLE 1.3 Frequency of Contests in Elections to Boards of Health, Improvement Commissioners, Borough and Urban District Councils, 18501899

1850-64

West Bromwich Y C (%) 10 90

1865-81

14

1882-99 b

Overall

Dudley Y 12

C (%) 33

50

16

18

50

42

60

Overalla

Bilston Y 15

C (%) 67

Y 37

C (%) 62

94

17

88

47

79

16

88

14

86

48

73

44

75

46

80

132

72

Notes: Y = years for which full information available; C = years in which some contest occurred as a percentage of Y. By-elections omitted. Poor Law contests were similarly frequent. a Simple average. b Weighted average. Source: Local newspapers.

Fairly frequent contests (see Table 1.3) and high levels of turnout in local elections (see Figure 1.1) meant that key social and cultural, as well as strictly political, conflicts could be expressed in, and partly resolved through, struggles to determine the identity and subsequently the decisions of those who served as Poor Law guardians, councillors and school-board members. Although participation varied considerably over time and according to the type of board involved, in elections for boards of commissioners and boards of health, as in those for guardians, voting often involved proportions of the population well above those polling in parliamentary elections before 1867. Moreover, school board and later council contests, occurring within especially open electoral systems, attracted numbers of voters comparable to Black Country parliamentary contests after the Second Reform Act. The proportions were high enough that, even if every middle-class elector had voted, there would still have been a substantial working-class participation in many years.15 Sometimes, turnout and excitement ran very high indeed. In West Bromwich, wealthy backers of a new workhouse lost several guardians’ elections in the 1850s to militant small ratepayers, including many workingmen voters, notably in the socially tense, fiercely-agitated and fraudulent contest of 1854.16 With the exception of fraud, these features also characterised the bitterly contested school board elections in Dudley and West Bromwich in the

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early 1870s, when the main issues and factions were much more closely tied to religion (and, in a more general sense, to lifestyle) than they were to class.17 As a result of these patterns, in the first half of the period the political notables of the area included marginal figures like the West Bromwich barber, George Wilkes (the hero of the 1854 guardians’ election), his fellow ex-Chartist Joseph Linney of Bilston and the Dudley draper Samuel Cook, a determined opponent of church rates. For years, these marginally middle-class men led socially diverse coalitions, which championed the interests of ordinary men and women, along with political and religious heterodoxy, against the instincts of their respectable social superiors. Later in the century, workingmen’s politics became better defined both at elections and in terms of the issues discussed subsequently in these local government bodies, again allowing political institutions to reflect the major conflicts of the day.18 The highly partisan local press, established separately in virtually every Black Country town by the 1880s, facilitated the process by which the views of an increasingly broad section of Black Country society were reflected in the political process. Parliamentary elections could mobilise large proportions of the Black Country electorate. In the second third of the century three-quarters of the electorate polled, although the still-narrow franchise meant that this involved less than a tenth of the adult males and an even smaller proportion of working men. This coverage, however, broadened especially sharply in the Black Country after 1867, when three-fifths of the adult males had the borough parliamentary vote and workingmen constituted at least three-fifths of the electors for these seats. Also, after 1867, in the two-thirds of possible contests that occurred, an average of about threequarters of the electors – approaching half of all adult males – cast their ballots, as indicated by Figure 1.2. Party allegiance was sufficiently socially diverse that, by the end of the period, each of the main partisan factions attracted many working-class voters as well as many middle-class electors.19

38

Chapter One

Figure 1.1 Turnout in Local Government Elections, 1841-1901 (a) Boards of Health, Improvement Commissioners, Borough and Urban District Councils (b) Poor Law (M) Notes: ‘Overall’ is a simple average. E = percentage of the electorate voting; M = percentage of adult males voting. Sources: As Table 1.2

Apart from better-developed party efforts to persuade electors to vote, this increasing mobilisation reflected the significant extent to which Black Country politics, local and parliamentary, adapted to the rapidly-shifting sensibilities and views of an electorate which was undergoing major social

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extension. Thus, both parties changed their styles of campaigning by holding more mass meetings and giving more prominence to workingclass leaders. The parties also adapted their stances on social issues, such as the eight-hour day and industrial conciliation, to an increasingly working-class electorate, while still giving such voters, and their social superiors, ample scope for local agitation on key national and international issues such as Irish Home Rule and the future of the Empire beyond the British Isles.20 Capitalising on and aggravating the problems of Liberal organisation in the district, the Liberal Unionists, who were especially important in the Black Country, also assisted the region’s party politics in coping with complex changes in the nature of the electorate.21 This responsiveness, along with the sheer pleasure of legitimised participation, helps to explain the excitement evident at Black Country parliamentary elections, such as the red herrings on sticks wielded in West Bromwich in 1868 and, in the same town 18 years later, the ejections made even from the galleries where ‘respectable’ participants sat.22 Thus, during a period of comparatively sharp political conflict in the area between the 1830s and 1880s, especially in local government but increasingly also in the parliamentary sphere, politics reflected the key aspirations and fears of the major social, cultural and religious groups within this volatile urban district, to a degree almost unimaginable in the early twenty-first century.

Community So far, this essay has approached the political process as mainly reactive: as a facilitator of the expression of conflict and, implicitly, as a means of crystallising the identities of the major urban contending groups. As political historians such as Jon Lawrence have recently reminded us, however, parties, elections and their discourses shape their constituents as well as being shaped by them.23 Thus, this second major part of the chapter will analyse the active influence of the political process. In particular, it will examine the ways in which urban politics facilitated the emergence of a sense of place - of urban community, transcending political factions.

40

Chapter One

Figure 1.2 Average Turnout in Parliamentary Elections (a) 1868-1884 (b) 1885-1900 Notes: E = percentage of electorate voting; M = percentage of adult males voting; WB = West Bromwich. Source: F.W.S. Craig, British Parliamentary Election Results: 1832-1885 (1977) and 1885-1914 (1974).

In the Black Country, as elsewhere, politics structured as well as stimulated major differences of views. Elections played a crucial role, concentrating public contention into the few weeks immediately preceding elections. Admittedly, in local government elections might occur every year, and there could be considerable excitement between contests, when

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major issues - pauper burials for instance - arose in the meetings of the public body in question. Yet these furores tended to be spasmodic. It was rare for local government elections to be highly contentious for years on end and, as only a portion of the representatives were elected in any given year (except in Poor Law elections), the local ‘establishment’ often retained a majority, albeit sometimes one that had to learn to make substantial concessions in terms of policy decisions. This concentration of unpleasantness was even more marked in parliamentary elections, where great excitement was inherently infrequent. Party associations had considerable difficulty in keeping up levels of consciousness, given that as many as six years intervened between contests. Thus, Black Country elections did as much to channel and institutionalise conflict as to heighten it. Moreover, elections and the associations that contested them helped to develop town and broader district identities. Elections, with their formal pomp (for example, the declaration of the result by the mayor) and less formal but highly structured rituals (rallies held by the party associations, for instance), intensified civic identity and pride, especially in a region often lampooned in the national press.24 In part, this occurred because these events increased awareness of those institutions which transcended the individual families, occupations and firms that made up the towns. There was pride, as well as boisterousness, for example, when the parliamentary result was announced at West Bromwich in 1886; a ‘scene of excitement probably without parallel…arose’ with surging crowds singing and setting off rockets.25 Moreover, just as elections and partisan institutions transcended individual hamlets, they linked the individual towns to wider and more prestigious personalities, urban areas and national institutions. It was a great event for a Black Country town to have national celebrities, such as Gladstone and Salisbury, address party rallies and for these heroes to discuss national and imperial issues which transcended local economic and social concerns. Just as the Black Country’s mayors and town clerks took increasingly prominent parts in district, regional and national associations, so did the area’s partisan bodies. It was a feather in Wolverhampton’s cap, for example, to host the annual meetings of the National Union of Conservative Associations in 1888 and 1901. Although they lacked such celebrity visits, local government elections and their surrounding rituals also played an important part in developing local identities. These effects were facilitated as the factions that contested local elections became more closely identified with the national parties. Moreover, at least after incorporation, the dignity of local government in

42

Chapter One

operation proved to be a strong antidote to the animosities whipped up on the hustings. In the Black Country, local government bodies usually kept partisanship under cover in the council chamber. Only occasionally, and sometimes in a confused fashion, did party allegiance determine decisions. As the mayor of West Bromwich argued in 1896, “At the elections in November, when matters were warm, they had sometimes tried to import party spirit, but once a member went to the council party spirit disappeared”.26 Although party – and ideology – mattered when local government bodies debated emotive subjects such as temperance and petitions dealing with national questions, party affiliation was not a good predictor of the votes of councillors in divisions on large municipal projects in West Bromwich, for example. While early in the period there were frequent battles concerning political honours, partisanship was of less importance once both major party groups had secured significant numbers of posts. This trend toward the unifying effect of local government business had its counterpart in the parliamentary sphere, where the district’s members of parliament balanced increasingly strong local identities with abiding national ties. Early in the period, parliamentary candidates, especially the victorious ones, were usually carpetbaggers who knew little about local affairs and, even between elections, did little to develop local institutions.27 A classic example was H.B. Sheridan, Liberal MP for Dudley between 1857 and 1886. His involvement in the controversial local case of a man who exposed himself on the town’s Castle Hill indicated the insensitivity of Sheridan’s approach to local politics. More characteristic of the latter period was Sheridan’s successor (1886-1906), the local Tory solicitor, Brooke Robinson, who campaigned successfully as ‘A Dudley Man for Dudley’.28 His West Bromwich colleague, J. Ernest Spencer, Conservative MP during the same twenty-year period and the product of a local business family, had a similar impact. A local Liberal conceded that, in the hard times that the Black Country was then experiencing, the party affiliation of the MP made little difference: to his credit, Spencer had used his connections in the iron trade to procure orders for the town.29 In Wolverhampton and Bilston, while the extremely venerable carpetbagger, C.P. Villiers (1835-98) represented the old trend, the Liberal Wesleyan, Henry Hartley Fowler (1880-1908), who gave the Black Country a homegrown Cabinet minister, and the Tory steel manufacturer, Sir Alfred Hickman (1895-1906), represented the new pattern. Now publicly generous to local charities and effusively complimentary to local government leaders on public platforms, the area’s MPs increasingly cooperated across party lines to press the Black Country’s interests at

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Westminster, notably on the important subject of railway rates. In many cases, they de-emphasised contentious partisan and sectarian crusades while cultivating a progressive approach to social issues.30 In marked contrast to the 1830s, by the early years of the twentieth century, for various reasons, there was a ‘complete absence of personal bitterness’ in parliamentary politics in the district.31 It could also plausibly be claimed of an MP such as Robinson that on his retirement ‘there was not a single political opponent who did not hold him in the highest respect’.32 Thus, MPs began to serve as symbols of the community that many of their actions furthered.33 Of course, as recent political historians have reminded us, the relationship between representatives and those they represent can never be unproblematic. However, it had become less problematic in the Black Country during this period, in part because of a skilful remodelling of the role of the MP, the issues he championed and the manner in which he did so. While it would be wrong, therefore, to see Black Country politics in the early years of the twentieth century as cosy - ritualism controversies, and the frantic elections of 1906 and 1910 belied that - the political process contributed to a sense of urban identity, and thus to a loose sense of community, much more at the end of the period than it had at the beginning. Overall, the increasing sophistication, broadening horizons and more flexible ideology of parties in the Black Country eased the process by which, previously backward and isolated, these localities forged a district identity, while becoming better identified both with their region and with the nation as a whole. In these important senses, in the Black Country at least, for all their shortcomings in terms of popular appeal and organisational continuity, parties were more effective at ‘channelling and neutralizing conflict’34 than recent political historians have sometimes been willing to allow.

Conclusion This chapter, therefore, suggests that in Victorian and Edwardian Britain sectarian, and lifestyle, as well as social, conflicts found a ready outlet in politics and helped to shape the political process. The essay also suggests that, particularly from the late nineteenth century, the political process itself helped to channel and shape various kinds of conflict, contributing to a real, albeit contested, sense of urban community. In the Black Country between the 1830s and the 1910s, politics crystallised both conflict and community, helping to produce for the towns of the area a

44

Chapter One

modern identity that was an amalgam of disintegrating and coherent forces. These processes may have been especially marked in the Black Country, where particularly rapid expansion gave way to especially troubling economic stagnation. These patterns may also have been particularly characteristic of the small-to-medium sized towns especially prevalent in the Black Country. Yet there are reasons to suppose that the political processes emphasised in this essay were occurring throughout urban Britain. Many urban areas, with towns of varying sizes, economic bases and structures, found prominent places in their politics for issues such as temperance and religious instruction, as well as for disputes between social groups on issues such as local government spending levels and the price of municipal utilities. This eclectic, responsive aspect of urban politics allowed major factions and conflicts to shape the political process. However, in many other Victorian and Edwardian urban areas, as in the Black Country, political parties and more broadly the political process, increasingly shaped disputes, thereby promoting community identity. These parallel patterns suggest the flexibility of Britain’s nineteenth and early twentieth century political institutions and processes, along with the malleability of that society’s urban conflicts and identities. Where does this leave urban history in relation to political history? Interdependence remains more essential than ever, as this case study indicates the importance of underlying urban change as well as the salience of a political process with its own dynamic and “discourse”. Just as urban historians need to pay increased attention to those themes of recent political history, so the latter needs to recognize the abiding importance of local social and political context and locally varying economic and social change in a country whose towns advanced rapidly in absolute and relative size, and then in political importance, between the 1830s and the 1910s. 1

This chapter is a revised version of a paper given at the Urban History Group conference on Politics at the University of Durham in April 2003. The paper and the chapter were written while I was Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Social History at the University of Greenwich, whose encouragement of my research during the time I was in post there I gratefully acknowledge, as I do the assistance of Dr Abigail Beach. 2 For example, D. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns 1774-1967 (Leicester, 1980); D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England (Leicester, 1976); E.P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons (London, 1973).

Conflict, Community and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Urban Politics: A Case Study of the Black Country

45

 For example: E. Biagini and A. J. Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1991); J. Lawrence & M. Taylor eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997). 4 For instance: M. Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester, 1832-67 (Aldershot, 1996); N. J. Morgan and R. H. Trainor, “The Dominant Classes”, in W. H. Fraser and R. J. Morris eds., People and Society in Scotland, vol.II 1830-1914 (Edinburgh, 1990), 103-37; R.J. Morris and R.H. Trainor, eds., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000); W. D. Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (Brighton, 1987); R.H. Trainor, “Urban Elites in Victorian Britain”, Urban History Yearbook (1985), 1-17. 5 D. Fraser, Power and Authority in the Victorian City (Oxford, 1979) D. Fraser ed., Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, 1982); J. Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns 1830-1880 (Manchester, 1983); A.C. Howe, The Cotton Masters 1830-1860 (Oxford, 1980); T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1990); R. J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds 1820-1850 (Manchester, 1990); R. J. Morris ed., Class, Power and Social Structure in Nineteenth Century British Towns (Leicester, 1986); R.H. Trainor, “Authority and Social Structure in an Industrialised Area: A Study of Three Black Country Towns, 1840-1890” (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1982) and R.H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area 1830-1900 (Oxford, 1993). 6 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 30-47, 126-32. 7 Ibid., 47-92, 112-19, 175-84. 8 Ibid., chs. 2-5, esp. (on politics), 112-19, 200-3. For detailed treatments, see H. Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections 1885-1910 (London, 1967); D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 1990), 180-9. 9 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 201-8. 10 Ibid., 208; Working Class Electors (P.P. 1866, LVII), 47-52. 11 J.A. Phillips and C. Wetherell, “Parliamentary Parties and Municipal Politics: 1835 and the Party System”, Parliamentary History, 13 (1994), 48-85; P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832-1841 (Woodbridge, 2002). Compare M. Taylor, “Interests, Parties and the State”, in Lawrence and Taylor, Party, State and Society, 70-1 noting the waning of this upsurge in activity from the 1850s. 12 Frank O’Gorman, “Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: the Social Meaning of Elections in England 1780-1860”, Past & Present 35 (1992), 79-115. Indeed, O’Gorman sees these community functions of rituals declining after the Second Reform Act. 13 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 201-8. 14 On this paragraph see Ibid., chs. 5-6.

46

15

Chapter One

Ibid., chs. 5 & 6, esp. 210, 236-7. TNA, MH 12/11631, T. Bolton to Poor Law Board, 11 May and 14 June 1854 and pamphlet by J. Spittle; Staffordshire Advertiser, 1 and 8 July 1854; Wolverhampton Chronicle, 3 May – 18 Oct. 1854, 9 June 1858, 25 July 1860. 17 Black Country Elites, 188-9. 18 Ibid., ch.6, esp. 254-60. 19 Ibid., ch.6, esp. 209-10. 20 Cf. Phillips and Weatherell, “Parliamentary Parties and Municipal Politics”, 182 for the importance of national issues in local politics as early as the 1830s; and J. Lawrence, “Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism”, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 632-3 and passim for the appeal of Toryism to working-class voters in many cities. 21 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 217-222. Cf. Tanner, Political Change, 181, overstating, however, the role of Liberal Unionism, and underestimating the power of anti-Tory forces, in the district. 22 Free Press (West Bromwich), 10 July 1886. 23 J. Lawrence, “Popular Politics and the Limitations of Party: Wolverhampton, 1867-1900”, in Biagini and Reed, Currents of Radicalism, 65-85; J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 18671914 (Cambridge, 1998). 24 Especially regarding Queen Victoria’s visit, early in her widowhood, to Wolverhampton “The Queen in the Black Country”, Punch, 51 [1866], 238. 25 Free Press (West Bromwich), 10 July 1886. 26 West Bromwich Council Minute Book 1895-6, 208; Trainor, Black Country Elites, 260-2. For the greater importance of religious affiliations in determining Council votes see J. Smith, “Avoiding ‘The Bitterness of Party Strife’: Borough Politics in Wolverhampton 1848-1888”, The Blackcountryman 38 (2004), 14-17. 27 In large English boroughs generally, the shift toward local MPs came only from the late 1860s: M. Taylor, “Interests, Parties and the State: The Urban Electorate in England, c.1820-72”, in Lawrence and Taylor, Party, State and Society, 63. 28 Hereford and Worcester Record Office 3762/46, Dudleiana, I, 20 Jan. 1906. 29 West Bromwich Library Scrapbook 13, 318. 30 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 222-8. 31 A. Griffith-Boscawen, Memories (London, 1925), 121. 32 Blocksidge’s Dudley Almanack 1907, 69. 33 For the general context see M. Rush, The Role of the Member of Parliament since 1868 (Oxford, 2001). 34 J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, “Introduction”, in Lawrence and Taylor, Party, State and Society, 2. 16

CHAPTER TWO THINGS AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE! ELITES, AND CONSTRUCTS OF CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT IN TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH MUNICIPAL POLITICS NICK HAYES

Writing in the mid 1960s about four northern industrial towns (Middleton, Salford, Manchester and Rochdale), Jim Bulpitt noted that the municipal parties sometimes had great difficulty in finding suitable candidates ̛ indeed, in the case of minority parties, any candidates ̛ to put forward for election.1 Such a rendition will be familiar to students of both nineteenth and twentieth century local politics, tied to a seemingly timeless discourse that continually berates the failing standard of, and the noticeable shortfall in, suitably able and socially well-qualified candidates willing to stand for local office.2 As that most formidable and blunt of characters, Dame Evelyn Sharp (Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Local Government and Housing) remarked in 1962: I don’t think that enough really able people are interested today in taking part in local government. I don’t think that enough people from business, from agriculture, from the professions, are going into it. I think that the average age of the councillors is a great deal too high …. And in consequence of all these things I think the work of authorities is often not good enough.3

We know a great deal about the social structure of those standing for local office in the post-war period, especially from 1960 onwards; a knowledge that, in many respects, contradicts the certainties offered above.4 As the Maud Committee’s researchers showed: employers and managers, and farmers and professional workers, occupy a larger proportion of the seats in councils than their proportion in the

48

Chapter Two general adult male population .… Members of local authorities are, on the average, better qualified than the electors, whether in terms of GCE passes, teachers’ certificates, professional qualifications or degrees.

Over-representation was true, particularly, of major employers/managers. These constituted some 8 per cent of economically-active male electors, but took over 22 per cent of urban council seats. Conversely, wage earners, representing 60 per cent of voters, occupied only 27 per cent of places.5 Perhaps such elites did not conform to Hennock’s political “ideal” of a prominent social leadership.6 Nonetheless, councillors were undoubtedly atypical: that is, “overwhelmingly male, middle-aged, middle-class - and, of course, white.” This was a situation that was to change only slowly over subsequent years.7 Once, however, we move away from the socio-political surveys of the 1960s and beyond, much less is known. This scarcity of knowledge is also true, comparatively, if we put the nineteenth-century industrial town/city ̛ much studied by historians ̛ side-by-side with its counterpart of the earlier twentieth century. This has led recently to several calls for a chronological refocusing by urban historians on the inter-war period.8 The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to survey briefly what we do know about the social participatory structure of local government in the first half of the twentieth century, then examine how that elite located itself within an allegedly, and increasingly, party-politically-orientated and partisan system.9 According to orthodox interpretations, why local elites in the twentieth century were no longer as willing, or perhaps even as able, to stand for local office can be summarised succinctly. First, socio-economic circumstances changed: the staple industries owned by elites declined in importance. Industry also became more pan-national, where the epicentre of control (and the elites themselves), physically moved to London, or conversely, “newcomers”, who lacked local loyalties, managed what were previously locally controlled companies. Decline also, reputedly, had a strong cultural component, partly wedded to the decay of “dissent”, but also, in mirroring Wiener’s thesis, that the public-school-educated offspring of Victorian entrepreneurs demurred from taking an interest in manufacturing and its associated provincial political agenda and instead opted for the countrified “easy life”, or became suburbanites, semidetached from city concerns.10 Arguably, too, they became enmeshed in a broader, national middle-class culture that deprecated the local “civic”. Even “optimists” note that before 1914 “upper” elites increasingly relegated the unpleasant tasks of urban governance to a “lower order” and, instead, concerned themselves with the more highly profiled civic ritual of

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus 49 and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics

public life and “first division” voluntary activity.11 Thus, the processes of earlier socio/political engagement broke down, although exactly when remains speculatively contentious. Not all the generalities listed above are thought to be universally applicable to all provincial cities. Contemporaries also noted examples of provincial vitality and continuing elite engagement, particularly, but not exclusively, in areas of relative economic prosperity. Thus, for some cities civic culture remained viable after 1918, whereas, in others, it became an “ideology under siege.”12 Yet, perhaps all this was of little consequence. Orthodoxy holds that the twentieth century witnessed the slow, but inexorable decline, of local “authority”, as power passed to Westminster and Whitehall. This was matched by the centralisation of voluntary associations and other forms of the civic ̛ that is local engagement ̛ as the authority of the central state grew exponentially. Local governance became less important so less attractive.13 Revisionists argue, however, that the inter-war period was one of relative advance, not decline, for local government; urban vitality gained renewed impetus, as more responsibility was handed down to, and/or taken up by, local institutions. Here, the interwar period may be viewed as one of transition; the last years of an enduring “heyday of local government”, but where, spatially, cities also became increasingly working class in culture, politics and experience.14 City identity was being redefined: politically, where elite structures changed, as Labour representation ate into earlier middle-class dominance (begging the question as to whether elite withdrawal occurred voluntarily); and socio-culturally, because civicness (the values and norms governing the local state and its responsibilities), similarly altered to reflect this new structure.15 Transition meant that popular expectations, civic culture, and media representations of that culture, could jar uncomfortably.16 Yet, if by the 1930s a younger generation saw themselves as part of a broader eclectic national elite, in some cities their parents remained politically and culturally wedded to a pre-war culture of “active” civic engagement through “closed” social networks centred on kinship, religious and political affiliation, charities and business organisations.17 Moreover, although a financial precariousness percolated through many voluntary associations, the inter-war period also saw a profusion of new, vibrant philanthropic ventures that recruited the middle-classes, partly as a response to the war (The British Legion), but also, for example, to counter the social distress of economic depression (mayoral appeals, the Round Table).18 The voluntary hospital movement also continued to flourish (albeit increasingly tied to payment and working-class mutuality), as did a plethora of leisure-based clubs and societies, offering new opportunities

50

Chapter Two

for networking. Indeed, the latter increasingly competed with older voluntary associations for the time and attention of elites.19 At the same time, key local institutions that had engaged elite power were replaced by national agencies, as when Poor Law Guardians were superseded by the Unemployment Assistance Board. Thus, voluntary initiatives in social welfare had both “considerable strengths” and “various weaknesses” that encouraged the “growth of the centralised and more maximal state”, whilst the “charitable side of the voluntary sector and commercial sector” continued to be seen by critics as “the preserve of the rich.”20 The nature and structure of elite political participation also changed noticeably. Instead of competing politically, as they had in the nineteenth century, now local elites drew together to fight socialism. The evidence for this is substantive, noticeable and readable, in the ubiquitous presence of anti-socialist pacts during the inter-war period. Such a process was aided by the relative decline of non-conformity, which lessened the divides between the traditional parties as business elites drew together under Conservatism, or a variety of nominal independent labels. Notwithstanding the inherently partisan nature of nineteenth-century municipal politics, this realignment, arguably, generated previously unknown belligerence.21 Perhaps this in itself ̛ and it was frequently cited as a reason why businessmen in the nineteenth century were reluctant to stand for publicly elected office ̛ offers one more insight into the decline of elite civic participation in the twentieth century.22 Yet, even accepting that to be an accurate evaluation we should be careful about reading too much into the public “hustling” discourse of politics. Although the 1920s witnessed a broader public battle for ideas, which could be highly personalised and extraordinarily vitriolic, election periods were atypical of public political behaviour generally. Even the anti-socialist presses could be overtly conciliatory in their public statements. This was even truer of the politicians themselves, for, while the presence of anti-socialist alliances dominated election mania, in other aspects of civic life, a consensual, rather than antagonistic, atmosphere prevailed.23 Nonetheless, Labour’s increasing presence in the town hall through the 1920s undoubtedly had an influence on the social composition of local councils. However, it would be an over-simplification to claim that, while the interests of industry dominated the nineteenth-century town, this was to be “increasingly occupied by Labour” in the twentieth century.24 Although Labour was to replace the Liberal party through the inter-war period, and notably capture some of the larger industrial cities like Sheffield (1926), or Leeds (1933), by 1939 it still only controlled around a third of all seats in the county boroughs.25 Only in 1945 were the

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus 51 and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics

Conservatives replaced as the “natural” party of local government and even then it was more a matter of sharing, rather than of dominance. In many cities, however, Labour gains did have a significant impact on the social composition of city councils. By 1930, in Leicester (table 2.1), for example, Labour was easily the largest single party (although falling below the combined Liberal/Conservative strength). This was reflected in the increasing percentage of working-class representatives (although, clearly, not all Labour candidates were working class), and in the rapid and continual fall in numbers from the nineteenth century of those large manufacturers engaged in civic politics (where large manufacturers are defined in terms of probate valuations over £25,000). Jones concludes that this decline immediately after the First World War, where large manufacturers gave way to smaller businessmen, was partly determined by conscious choice, but was mainly a product of the rising influence of the party machine. “Thus party replaced status as the key factor in gaining office.”26 Table 2.1 Occupation of City Councillors and Aldermen Leicester 1881-193127

1881 %

1901 %

1911 %

1921 %

1931 %

Large Business

32.7

22.8

16.9

11.2

4.8

Small Business

30.8

29.5

28.8

37.2

30.7

Independent

5.8

8.2

5.1

6.5

1.6

Professional

9.6

14.8

18.6

16.1

12.9

Shopkeepers

7.7

8.2

6.8

4.8

12.9

Drink

11.5

4.9

1.7

0.0

1.6

Clerks, etc

1.9

4.9

6.8

6.5

8.1

Working Class

0.0

11.5

15.3

17.7

21.0

Women

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

6.5

52

Chapter Two

There are problems, however, with such an analysis. As Jones later acknowledges, several very significant businessmen of stature continued to hold sway over council affairs well into the inter-war period.28 Indeed, what is striking about local press coverage during the 1920s is the prominence afforded, and the ever present sense of deference given, to statements by those substantial local businessmen who remained active in municipal affairs.29 It might also be noted that, within the Conservative and Liberal parties (and amalgams of the two), manufacturing interests continued to be represented strongly into the inter-war period. In Wolverhampton, while the proportion of councillors listed as manufacturers fell heavily after 1920, they remained the largest block on the council throughout the decade. Indeed, more manufacturers entered the chamber for the first time than did workers (the next largest grouping). Only in the years after 1929 were manufacturers overtaken, by a considerable margin, by shopkeepers and workers in terms of total numbers and the numbers of new entrants. Only, too, in the 1930s did the “quality” of manufacturers also fall, where the “great ironmasters and metal ware manufacturers … no longer joined”, to be replaced by “lesser men in charge of smaller enterprises.” Moreover, as elsewhere, informal community and business networks still provided the recruitment avenues for Conservative and Liberal candidates; primarily, it was only Labour men and women who secured local candidature by previous service to the party.30 In 1920s’ Sheffield, 35 per cent of councillors and aldermen were manufacturers (a figure roughly comparable with those on the council before 1914), including “a higher proportion than before of those concerned with large-scale enterprises ̛ managers of the largest engineering companies and department stores.”31 After the First World War, “the proportion of directors of large manufacturing firms, in relation to professional men and merchants, was far higher” in Sheffield’s antisocialist coalition, Citizens’ Association, with its strong pro-business ethos, “than in either the Liberal or Conservative parties” before 1914.32 Nor was it the case that the inter-war move to the suburbs necessarily separated the middle classes from city life.33 Very little work has been done on this, but a preliminary survey of Nottingham addresses reveals that, through time, between 1900 and 1950, 85 per cent of the city’s magistrates, 90 per cent of councillors and aldermen, and 95 per cent of poor law guardians, continued to reside within the city boundary. Of these, however, the proportion that entered office before and after the First World War and who lived in exclusive enclaves, like Nottingham’s Park

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus 53 and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics

district, did fall markedly, more than halving (as would be expected, when Labour nominees rose in numbers). If we look only at Conservative councillors, however, the numbers living in such socially select areas fell only slightly, in ways similar to Birmingham, where its non-conformist elite, who dominated social life, continued to reside in the centre of Edgbaston.34 Of these, some 15 per cent of Nottingham’s sample ̛ who provided the social and political leadership of the local Conservative Party ̛ left over £100,000, while a further 15 per cent left over £50,000, on death.35 Moreover, if we broaden this enquiry beyond the formal world of politics, to include elite involvement in city-based civil society, we find strong continuums ̛ indeed, very little change. The locally wealthy, therefore, continued to exert a dominant influence in charitable and associational work before and after the war. In fact, despite it suburban extensions, inter-war Nottingham remained a compact city, where the radius from centre to extreme was constant before and after 1914-18. Indeed, those estates that were built the furthest from the city centre tended to be working-class, rather than middle-class enclaves.36 In the longer term, middle-class authority in local government was set to continue. A sample survey of councils (Kent, Croydon and Lewisham) 1931-1959, again taken at a time when criticism was resurfacing over the declining quality of local councillors, found that, overall, there was a continuing middle-class dominance throughout the period. In Lewisham, however, a marked incongruity existed before and after the Second World War so that, after 1945, the numbers from census groups III and IV matched or exceeded those of Groups I and II.37 Morris and Newton, who undertook a similar survey for Birmingham 1925-1966 (table 2.2), found, as expected, a major and consistent difference in the social composition of councillors between the parties. It might reasonably be concluded that business and professional elite interests (his social class I – business and higher professionals at some 2 per cent of the city’s population in 1951) remained centrally and wholly disproportionately embedded within the Conservative party and within middle-class wards, at a local level, in a way that closely mirrors nineteenth-century antecedents (although, obviously, no qualitative analysis is possible without detailed personal biographic detail).

Chapter Two

54

Table 2.2 Social Class of Occupied Male Council Members Birmingham City by Party38 Social Class

1930 Con Lab %

1938 Con Lab %

1950 Con Lab %

1960 Con Lab %

1966 Con Lab %

I

92 23

90 31

75 16

80 13

77 21

II

2 46

6 44

18 32

13 29

15 16

III

5 31

3 41

6 49

7 50

9 53

IV

0 0

0 0

0 3

0 9

0 9

V

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

(nos)

(42) (26)

(65) (16)

(93) (37)

(61) (56)

(69) (57)

Where social classes I and II equate, roughly, with the middle class (owners, managerial, professional and administrative), these surveys highlight the overall disparity between a cross-sectional representation of the population as a whole, and in councils, and, instead, a continuing middle-class domination. As has been frequently noted of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the question of “quality” - the assumption, for example, that business leadership is an ideal prerequisite for public office remains at best problematic. Nevertheless, both surveys register that administrative/commercial experience within the councillor cadre (if measured by middle-class presence) was hardly lacking. In common with other surveys in the 1970s and 1980s, they register, for example, that educational standards of candidates had improved significantly through the century.39 Indeed, as noted earlier, it could be argued that councillors through the century, in continuing to be typically white, middle class and male, lacked democratic social qualifications in that they remained atypical of the broader population, and, therefore, notably unrepresentative of that very local electorate at ward level for whom they purported to serve and speak. Embedded within the argument of the falling calibre of councillors is the implicit assumption that the intrusion of party politics into local government, effectively, drove out “good men”: through the predominance, for example, of a party-led nomination system and the

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus 55 and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics

subsequent operation of strict internal party discipline (particularly the pre-meeting caucus). Associated with both was a theorem, developed after the First World War, that “party politics should be kept out of local government because local issues were different from national issues.”40 Aside from being an overtly political discourse, driven by the traditional parties, it also had strong nostalgic and illusionary overtones.41 That this was a wilful misconstruction of the past has long been acknowledged.42 Nevertheless, such a construct had a major impact in the early to midtwentieth century on how activity within the council chamber was judged, both by the participants, and by the broader electorate, through the local press. We started by noting the prevalence of anti-socialist pacts after, and in some cases, before 1918, yet to focus on political divisions is, in part, to misconstrue local understanding. “Localness” needs to be read, too, within a broader remit where, in many towns and cities, anti-socialist pacts were intermittent and/or transitory.43 There also existed an equally resonant yet contradictory discourse, circulating through local newspapers and, more formally, through the conventions of civic politics, which stressed consensual and civically-centric values placing political inclusivity and accommodation above factionalism (except during the annual election periods). Thus, the presence of loose “anti-socialist” electoral coalitions and lasting divisions over key “ideological” policies (for example, the use of direct labour) did not preclude active forms of co-operation within councils’ committee systems, with their shared intimacies of specialist knowledge, joint responsibility and endeavour (and on which Labour had ever-increasing representation).44 Such accommodation rested on reaching amicable compromises over patronage distribution. Failure to do so could have a very noticeable impact on intra-party relations. Bulpitt noticed as late as the 1960s ̛ after formalised party politics, supposedly, had been in place for half a century ̛ that the distribution of “Council patronage … [was] the most frequent cause of party disputes.” He went on to highlight that: “No Council managed to avoid such disputes, and their frequency, longevity and viciousness were extraordinary.”45 Theorists have since argued that patronage distribution (that is, the selection for office of committee chairs, aldermanic posts, the mayoralty) remains the single most contentious issue in local government circles, disagreement being spurred by the search for self-aggrandisement or party power.46 So common were such disagreements or, viewed another way, so strong was the desire to avoid misunderstanding and unnecessary conflict, that quite elaborate “rules of the game” were drawn up in many authorities beyond the more ubiquitous,

Chapter Two

56

informal agreements, to regulate patronage distribution.47 By contrast, in those councils where compromise over patronage distribution was not reached - like Sheffield - deep division and great bitterness was generated between the traditional parties and Labour.48 Table 2.3 Committee and Patronage Distribution in Inter-War Nottingham Chairs

Vice-Chairs

Aldermen

Party Strength

Con. Lib. Lab.

Con. Lib. Lab.

Con. Lib. Lab.

Con. Lib. Lab

17

7

-

1920

22

5

1923

19

1926

16

7

-

8

8

-

37

23

2

1

12

12

2

8

6

2

34

21

9

5

1

10

11

2

8

6

2

35

17

11

18

5

2

7

9

6

7

5

4

30

15

18

1929

13

5

9

8

4

12

6

4

6

27

11

26

1932

17

3

7

11

3

12

8

2

6

34

8

22

1935

14

1

10

10

1

12

9

1

6

32

3

29

1938

14

-

10

11

-

12

8

-

8

34

1

29

1913

Nevertheless, from this perspective it is possible to reinvent orthodox historical renditions of nineteenth/twentieth century comparisons, where the latter is written as being the more overtly political in such terms as patronage distribution, the caucus and the broader extension of party control into local government. What we see, in short, is an inter-war swansong, lamenting a past ‘golden age’ that never was.49 We can use Nottingham (table 2.3) to illustrate this point. In the nineteenth century the city was dominated by a Liberal caucus elite. All aldermanic placements, all committee chairs and vice-chairs, and the mayoralty, for example, were monopolised by the majority party.50 By contrast, in the supposedly more politically virile inter-war period, patronage positions - after an initial settling-in period - were more amicably and fairly distributed. Contemporaries, it seems, were able to draw a line between “the hot-house atmosphere” of elections and anti-socialist pacts, and the necessities of

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus 57 and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics

everyday council business.51 Indeed, leaders of the traditional parties went out of their way publicly to confirm adherence to such a doctrine, even after Labour’s electoral setbacks in the early 1920s.52 Thus, in the mid1920s, although the committee hierarchy was still dominated by the old parties where party tradition, lineage and sometimes arbitrary seniority, reinforced Conservative hegemony, as its strength grew Labour increasingly controlled the junior posts within committees. From the early 1930s, joint agreement formally acknowledged that committee offices should be allocated in proportion to party strength. We have the basis, therefore, of a very twentieth-century understanding of “local” politics in the inter-war period; a new construct of what politics meant to participants, concurrent with the rise of Labour. How typical Nottingham was, it is difficult to say. Customs varied considerably in detail between local authorities, and, even within one council, might fluctuate noticeably, back and forth, within short periods of time.53 Indeed, practices continued to be non-uniform well into the1950s. What can be said, however, is that if the ferocity of attack flowing from the wider introduction of single-party rule in the 1950s signifies anything, it is that inter-war consensual practices were much more common than has been previously supposed or reported. Placing city before party, epitomised by the degree of cross-party voting, putting committee loyalty above party, aldermanic and mayoral independence, was more than simply newspaper rhetoric; it was a dominant discourse and philosophy to which many newspapers and councillors actively subscribed and contributed.54 Despite the politicisation of council business by the late nineteenth century, this meant that council members commonly saw loyalty to one’s council committee ̛ and thus to the civic ideal ̛ as being as important as loyalty to one’s party.55 Importantly, this continued through the inter-war period, and, in some cities, into the 1940s and 1950s.56 In the twentieth century, this “civicness” had, as its anchor, the equitable distribution of patronage measured, particularly, in terms of a “formal” acknowledgment through everyday practice of Labour’s place in the town hall. The underlying importance of an adherence to this common code of reciprocal behaviour - that is of shared values and beliefs - cannot be over emphasised and has been lost generally amid tales of Labour’s triumphant rise, or to a lesser extent, traditional party resistance to the “new” intrusion of party. It is widely held that urban spaces acquire “human” meaning, through agency and association: those frequently unspoken values and norms, patterns of doing, thinking and feeling that form a shared sense of identity, where meaning is attributed to actions, objects, and other people, through such codes and filters.57 If we want to understand the city, we

58

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need to understand this civic culture, yet, clearly, a greater balance needs to be struck between the headline rhetoric of “decline”, disengagement and intolerance that dominates our understanding of this past and the “lost” counter-discourses and everyday practices of pragmatic accommodation and consensually-shared values that governed city politics in the first half of the twentieth century. 1

J. Bulpitt, Party Politics in English Local Government (London, 1967), 96-7. E.P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London, 1973); Brian Keith-Lucas and Peter Richards, A History of Local Government in the Twentieth Century (London, 1978), 92-102. 3 Dame Evelyn Sharp, “The Future of Local Government,” Public Administration, 40 (1962), 385, cited Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, 92. Sharp is widely quoted in this respect. For a summary of similar contemporaneous comments, see L. J. Sharpe, “Elected Representatives in Local Government,” British Journal of Sociology, 13 (1962): 201-2; or Donald Read, The English Provinces c.1760-1960: A Study in Influence (London, 1964), 240. 4 For example, William Hampton, Local Government and Urban Politics (London, 2nd ed. 1991), ch. 7 (summarising the profiles identified by the Maud (1969), Robinson (1977) and Widdicombe (1986) surveys); K. Newton, Second City Politics: Democratic Processes and Decision-Making in Birmingham (Oxford, 1976), ch. 6; J. Blondel and R. Hall, “Conflict, Decision-making and the Perception of Local Councillors,” Political Studies, 15 (1967); 322-50. 5 Royal Commission on Local Government in England 1966-1969: Volume III (Cmnd. 4040), (1969), 130, 138. 6 Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 308ff. 7 John Gyford, Steve Leach and Chris Game, The Changing Politics of Local Government (London, 1989), 45-8. 8 W.D. Rubinstein, “Britain’s Elites in the Inter-War Period, 1918-39,” in Alan Kidd and David Nicholls eds., The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies in Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1998), 186202; R.J. Morris, “Author’s Response – Urban Governance in Britain and Beyond since1750”, Reviews in History, http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ihr/reviews (accessed March, 2003); Nick Hayes, “Two Tales of the City? Probing Urban and Architectural History,” Journal of Contemporary History, 37, (2002), 665-74. 9 Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, ch. 6; John Gyford, “The Politicization of Local Government,” in Martin Loughlin, David Gelfand and Ken Young eds., Half a Century of Municipal Decline 1935-1985 (London, 1985), 7797. 10 G. W. Jones, Borough Politics: A Study of the Wolverhampton Town Council, 1888-1964 (London, 1968), 116-19; Rubinstein, “Britain’s elites,” 196-200; Margaret Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (Oxford, 1960), ch. 2 and 3; Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840-1914 (Manchester, 2000), 187-99; 2

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus 59 and Conflict In Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics

R.H. Trainor, “Neither Metropolitan nor Provincial: The Inter-War Middle Class,” in Kidd and Nicholls, British Middle Class, 203-213. Trainor argues elsewhere that for the nineteenth century, at least, local industrial elites remained wedded to their industrial heritage, R.H. Trainor, Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialising Area 1830-1900 (Oxford, 1993), 74-6. 11 R.H. Trainor, “The ‘Decline’ of British Urban Governance since 1850,” in R.J. Morris and R.H. Trainor eds., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000), 35-6: R.H. Trainor, “The Middle Class,” in Martin Daunton ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain Volume 3 1840-1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 676, 711. 12 David Reeder and Richard Rodger, “Industrialisation and the City Economy,” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 585. 13 Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, ch. 6; Gyford, “Politicization”; James Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1991). For a recent thoughtful assessment of central-local relations taking this line, see, John Davis, “Central Government and the Towns,” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 261-86. 14 John Stevenson, British Society 1914-45 (Harmondsworth, 1984), 307-8 ; R.J. Morris, “Structure, Culture and Society in British Towns,” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 418; Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840-1940 (London, 1994), 62-72. 15 Trainor, “Decline”; John Garrard, “Urban Elites, 1850-1914: The Rule and Decline of a New Squirarchy,” Albion, 27, (1995), 583-621. 16 Nick Hayes, “Civic Perceptions: Housing and Local Decision-Making in English Cities in the 1920s,” Urban History, 27, (2000), 211-33. 17 Barry Doyle, “The Structure of Elite Power in the Early Twentieth-Century City: Norwich, 1900-35,” Urban History, 24, (1997), 179-99. 18 Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain 1830-1990 (Oxford, 1994), 201ff. 19 Steven Cherry, “Before the National Health Service: Financing the Voluntary Hospitals, 1900-1939,” Economic History Review, 50, (1997), 305-26; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 (Oxford, 1998), 87, 359-62. 20 Finlayson, Citizen, State, 250, 281-2. 21 C. Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain 1922-1929 (Harmondsworth, 1975), ch. 3; Mike Goldsmith and John Garrard, “Urban Governance: Some Reflections,” in Morris and Trainor, Urban Governance, 18. McKibbin, for example, see anti-working class sentiment as a binding force for, and central tenet of, middle-class identity in the first half of the twentieth century, McKibbin, Classes and Culture. 22 John Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns 1830-80 (Manchester, 1983). For the opposing view, see Trainor, Black Country Elites. 23 Sue Goss, Local Labour and Local Government: A Study of Changing Interests, Politics and Policy in Southwark, 1919 to 1982 (Edinburgh, 1988); Mike Bromley and Nick Hayes, “Campaigner, Watchdog or Municipal Lackey? Reflections on

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the Inter-War Provincial Press, Local Identity and Civic Welfarism,” Media History, 8, (2002), 197-212; Nick Hayes, Consensus and Controversy: City Politics in Nottingham 1945-1966 (Liverpool, 1996), 13-14; David Reeder, “Municipal Provision: Education, Health and Housing,” in David Nash and David Reeder eds., Leicester in the Twentieth Century (Stroud, 1993), 121-157. 24 Barry Doyle, “The Changing Functions of Urban Government,” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 308. 25 Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, 116. 26 Ibid., 70. 27 Peter Jones, “Office Holding, Politics and Society: Leicester and Peterborough, c. 1860-c.1930,” (MPhil diss., University of Leicester, 1983, 69). The central theme of J. M. Lee, Social Leaders and Public Persons: a Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888 (Oxford, 1963), is that through the twentieth century elite status followed increasingly from holding elected office, rather than from previous social or economic standing. 28 Peter Jones, “Politics,” in Nash and Reeder, Leicester, 93-4. 29 For an exemplar see Leicester Mail, 25 June 1925. 30 Jones, Borough Politics, 95-100, 108-9, 368-9. 31 Helen Mathers, “Sheffield Municipal Politics 1893-1926: Parties, Personalities and the Rise of Labour,” (PhD diss., University of Sheffield, 1979), 35-9. 32 Ibid., 229-30. 33 Read, English Provinces, 232-9. Doyle, “Structure of Elite Power,” offers a useful corrective from such generalisations. 34 David Cannadine, “Victorian Cities: How Different,” in R.J. Morris and Richard Rodger eds., The Victorian City 1820-1914 (London, 1993), 133-4; Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth, 1963), 204. 35 It should be noted that in the post 1918 period the large-scale tax avoidance of death duties and inflation make the use of probate figures problematic. 36 John Giggs, “Housing, Population and Transport,” in John Beckett ed., A Centenary History of Nottingham (Manchester, 1997), 435-62. 37 Sharpe, “Elected Representatives,” 205-6. The figures for Lewisham were 44 per cent middle class and only 6 per cent working-class in 1930, 40 per cent each by 1953, but with a 35 per cent to 50 per cent working-class differential by 1959. Figures generally would be more skewed still in favour of middle-class participation if those with independent means/retired/house-wives were also included. 38 D.S. Morris and K. Newton, “The Social Composition of a City Council: Birmingham 1925-1966,” Social and Economic Administration, 5 (1971), 33. 39 Morris and Newton, “Social Composition,” Table 1, and 30-2; Sharpe, “Elected Representatives”, 204-8; Garrard, Leadership, 63-73; Hampton, Local Government, 120-2; Jones, Borough Politics, ch 7. 40 Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, 115. For an exemplar of this interpretation see, Geoffrey Block, Party Politics in Local Government (London, 1962).

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41

Lee, Social Leaders, 60. Ken Young, Local Politics and the Rise of Party: The London Municipal Society and the Conservative Intervention in Local Elections (Leicester, 1975); Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester, 1976). 43 Doyle, “Structure of Elite Power”; Nick Hayes, “The Government of the City, 1900-1974: The Consensus Ethos in Local Politics,” in Beckett, Nottingham, 46379. 44 See, for example, Hayes, Consensus. For Leicester, see David Reeder, “Municipal Provision: Education, Health and Housing,” in Nash and Reeder, Leicester. See also the chapter by Shane Ewen in this volume. 45 Bulpitt, Party Politics, 97. 46 Ibid., 127-8; see also L.J. Sharpe, “In Defence of Local Politics,” in L.J. Sharpe ed., Voting in Cities: The 1964 Borough Elections (London, 1967), 12-13; Jones, Borough Politics, 181-3, 198-200. 47 W. Thornhill, “Agreements between Local Political Parties in Local Government Matters,” Political Studies, 5 (1957), 83-9; H. V. Wisemen, “The Working of Local Government in Leeds Part II: More Party Conventions and Practices,” Public Administration, 41 (1963), 137-156. 48 Mathers, “Sheffield,” 218-19, 234-5; H. Keeble Hawson, Sheffield: The Growth of a City 1893-1926 (Sheffield, 1967), 295-8; Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, 120; H. Emerson Smith, “Party Politics in English Local Government,” Secretaries’ Chronicle, March 1955, 159. 49 Keith-Lucas and Richards, Local Government, 111-119: Block, Party Politics, passim; G. M. Harris, Municipal Government in Britain: A Study of the Practice of Local Government in Ten of the Larger British Cities (London, 1939), 46-52. 50 Duncan Smith, “The Municipal Political Culture and Municipalization of Nottingham 1850-1900,” (PhD diss., Nottingham Trent University, 2005). For the practices elsewhere see, for example, Garrard, Leadership and Power, 161-2; Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 181 51 Hayes, Consensus, 21-8. 52 Ibid. 53 For example, Jones, Borough Politics, passim; Sharpe, Voting. See also Ewen in this volume. 54 Bromley and Hayes, “Campaigner, Watchdog”. 55 James Moore and Richard Rodger, “Municipal Knowledge and Policy Networks in British Local Government,” Yearbook of European Administrative History, 15 (2003), 41. 56 Hayes, Consensus. 57 A. Zijdervled, A Theory of Urbanity: The Economic and Civic Cultures of Cities (New Brunswick, 1998); Morris, “Structure, Culture and Society,” in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 395-426. 42

PART II: POLITICS, INSTITUTIONS AND URBAN MANAGEMENT

CHAPTER THREE “POLICING” PARTY POLITICS 1 IN THE MIDLANDS, C.1900-1938 SHANE EWEN

Reassessing local politics and the “rise” of party Recent studies of local politics during the early twentieth century have emphasised an alleged partisanship, reflected in the Labour party’s rapid electoral growth during the late 1920s, the creation of anti-socialist electoral alliances and the socially inclusive nature of Labour’s inter-war welfare policies, including an increasing focus on women’s issues. According to this literature, by the 1930s the party machine had evolved to become the single biggest determinant of policy within local government, overtaking hitherto dominant ideals of municipal expansionism, civic pride and inter-urban rivalry.2 Indeed, the rise of Labour and the extension of the franchise in 1918 have been identified as challenging central government’s faith in the system of local government, particularly with the fiscal constraints and public expenditure restrictions imposed by the “Geddes Axe” during the 1920s.3 Moreover, accusations of civic incompetence within local administration were widespread by the Edwardian years, particularly in response to the declining numbers of large manufacturing proprietors on the town councils of northern England.4 This withdrawal of traditional upper-middle-class elites from civic affairs was, according to Garrard and Trainor, the consequence of the diffusion of transport networks, their physical movement to the outlying suburbs and satellite towns, the decomposition of local capital and the “ever more complicated and irksome” practice of municipal administration.5 This conventional wisdom has, however, been challenged and research into East Anglia, Yorkshire and the Midlands has demonstrated the enduring civic service of local businessmen and social elites, despite contemporary concerns that some municipalities traded on their past reputations.6 This paper contends that the Midlands cities, in particular,

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with their relatively small-scale firms and prosperous domestic markets, combined with the active participation of local elites in civic affairs, had a lasting influence on local capital movements and civic government throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century.7 Moreover, a case study of the administration of urban “policing” by the Birmingham and Leicester watch committees during the first four decades of the twentieth century, will demonstrate that social substance was a marginal characteristic required for civic service by the 1920s. Rather, the increasing complexity and volume of everyday administrative work demanded the interaction of elected members and paid officials (notably the chief constable and fire officer), with both groups sharing a substantial degree of administrative knowledge and specialised legal expertise. The structure and resource-allocation of municipal government demanded transferable skills beyond wealth and sociability, particularly with a more diverse electorate representing broader social interests. Local and technical knowledge, an ability to communicate with varied social classes and professional groups and an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary local government, were of greater relevance and were reflected in the changing social and professional structure of local councils. Although accusations of poor leadership and inexpert administration were levelled at local government, the inadequacies of civic elites were generally most acute in those “national and onerous” services like policing, education and social welfare, which were jointly funded by national and local taxation and subjected to inspection and minimum standards of service delivery.8 This led civil servants, ministers and academics, notably William Robson and G. D. H. Cole, to propose either regional or national approaches to service delivery, particularly in the fields of health and utilities, in order to bypass inefficient units of administration, reinforce central regulatory control and improve local “best practice”.9 These regional approaches, it was suggested, would be based around the existing county borough system. Central departments, cautious of incurring the wrath of experienced councillors, aldermen and chief officials, rarely challenged the authority of large and wealthy county boroughs. These county boroughs, including Birmingham and Leicester, derived their authority from more than statutory directives and influenced national policy-making through a combined programme of lobbying, consultation and co-operation rooted in their considerable financial and organisational resources and their legal-constitutional authority. County boroughs overtook county councils as the more prestigious tier of local government during the early twentieth century and many extended their

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boundaries into the surrounding wealthy districts. Meanwhile, non-county boroughs like Luton and Enfield sought incorporation as county boroughs in order to extend their powers over local services, rather than relying on jointly delivering services with the unpopular county councils. Intergovernmental friction was particularly evident over the dispersal of police officers between urban and rural centres and the responsibility for maintaining main roads.10 Although county boroughs contemplated administering some services jointly with counties, they were usually fiercely protective of their independence. The county boroughs in the Midlands were especially noted for their commitment to a distinctive municipal culture, dominated by local entrepreneurial and non-conformist interests.11 For example, although Birmingham and Leicester held different positions within the urban rank hierarchy, they shared a progressive liberal political agenda. Their civic reform programmes, continuing beyond the late Victorian high point in civic investment, were largely funded through long-term loans raised on the capital markets, profits from public utilities and, to a lesser extent, local rates.12 Historians have suggested, however, that the dismantling of Birmingham’s “civic gospel” and its concomitant programmes, through a combination of declining Liberal representation and anti-socialist rhetoric, accelerated after Joseph Chamberlain’s death in 1914.13 In Leicester, the growth in the Labour party’s representation on the city council to become the largest single party by 1927 and the declining proportion of large manufacturers serving civic office, has been identified as the result of the entrenchment of party politics and the interlocking of party and policy.14 Party politics has been identified as increasingly influential on municipal administration, particularly in the welfare, health and education policy networks.15 Elsewhere, however, party conflict was less evident and consensual relations existed between the mainstream parties. The creation of municipal savings banks, for example, was a means of raising revenue and reinforcing municipal autonomy,16 as epitomised by the Birmingham Savings Bank, opened in 1916 through the initiative of the mayor, Neville Chamberlain and receiving wide cross-party support, including that of the Association of Municipal Corporations. Similarly, in Birmingham and Leicester, there was consensus that profits on public utilities should be used as rateable relief. During the 1910s and 1920s Birmingham’s gas, electricity and tramways departments contributed a combined £100,000 annually towards rate relief, whilst profits of £894,000 were contributed by Leicester’s gasworks towards relief, or loan redemption, between 1878 and 1922.17 Even housing provision, with its ideological divisions over home ownership, attracted bi-

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partisan solutions, especially in Nottingham, with its commitment to nontraditional construction methods.18 Although party politics influenced municipal politics during annual elections, it was limited in its routine administrative and policy influence by a bi-partisan commitment to civic government and opposition to wholesale central intervention. Municipal government remained “important and expanding” during the inter-war years, despite the extension of central financial and regulatory controls. Investment in public housing, maternity and infant welfare and an expansion in public fire protection reinforced the dynamism of municipal government. “Local politics”, as noted by Ken Newton in his study of post-war Birmingham, “are not simply national politics writ small”.19

Repositioning the watch committee “Policing”, similarly, was a non-partisan feature of modern municipal administration. As the means for maintaining public order, protecting private property, improving public decency and self-responsibility, “policing” was a common objective shared by late Victorian and Edwardian urban elites. As early as the 1760s Adam Smith had identified “police” as one of the four “great objects” of law, alongside “justice”, “revenue” and “arms”. Thus, the practice of “policing” was a means for local authorities to regulate the urban environment, maintain public cleanliness and provide security to private property.20 By the late nineteenth century, fire was a common urban fear that threatened industrial and residential districts despite the greater durability of modern construction. This ubiquitous fire risk demanded the municipalisation of fire fighting and water supplies in order to protect urban construction, working and social practices while improving public health provision.21 In Leicester and Birmingham, the responsibility for administering urban “policing” rested with the watch committee.22 Formed in 1835 and 1842 respectively as the first statutory municipal committee to administer local police forces, by the 1900s the watch committee had evolved into the most prestigious and independent committee in both councils, having obtained additional regulatory powers for managing the fire brigade and regulating places of entertainment, the storage of explosives and inflammable substances, child welfare, traffic control, licensing, Sunday trading, film censorship and, in Leicester, street lighting.23 Consisting of the mayor as a ex officio member and not more than one-third of the council’s elected representatives, the watch committee was a uniquely urban institution and one of only two standing committees prevented from co-opting unelected members (the other being the finance committee). It

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sat in secret and its proceedings did not require the council’s approval, although it had no powers to levy a rate without the finance committee’s consent.24 Notwithstanding this limited control, it produced its own estimates and was responsible for examining its own accounts. Councillors aspired to become members and the watch committee of a large and prestigious county borough was empowered to decide questions of “police” policy locally, with the council unable to make similar decisions before considering prior reports. Statistical analysis of the party composition of the Birmingham and Leicester councils and watch committees mirrored general changes in party politics (table 3.1). Although in real decline from 1900, for example, the stubborn influence of the Liberal party in Leicester was evident during the inter-war years. In Birmingham, the Liberal party’s corresponding collapse was more the product of specific local circumstances, with the merger of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties, in 1918, creating a unique electoral pact, assisted by a buoyant economy. The Unionists made great strides in the inner-city wards and the expanding industrial suburbs, such as Gravelly Hill and Yardley.25 Moreover, the Labour party struggled to obtain significant influence on either watch committee until 1919. Even then, the “Unionist” alliance dominated Birmingham watch committee throughout the 1920s and 1930s, although Labour became numerically the largest party on Leicester watch committee three years before achieving the same feat on the council. Although the composition of both watch committees indicated the potential for partisanship, the nature and prestige of their administrative responsibilities were obstacles to widespread party voting. The watch committee was, after all, the focal point of early twentieth-century “police” administration, yet few studies have noted more than the regularity of meetings and devolution of “day-to-day matters of discipline and deployment” to the chief constable.26 However, the watch committee’s unique legal position, its administrative autonomy and its ability to respond to ratepayers’ demands for scrutiny of the finances and administrative decisions of the police and fire departments, meant that its more experienced members were as expert in administration and policy as high-ranking officials in both departments. Alfred James, for example, a jeweller and general outfitter was a permanent member of Birmingham watch committee between 1911 and 1939, serving as chairman (1921-23), as well as lord mayor (1926-28). He began his civic service on the Aston Manor Board of Guardians, from where he transferred to the city council after incorporation, representing the Conservative party from the predominantly working-class Lozells

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ward. In 1921, he was elected as one of the Association of Municipal Corporations’ three representatives to serve on the Police Council, a national policy advisory body to the Home Office established in 1919. James remained on the Police Council until 1932, whereupon he resigned to become traffic commissioner for the West Midlands Area, under the Road Traffic Act, 1930. James also served on the tramways, general purposes, and airport committees and was president of the general and children’s hospitals, a governor of Birmingham University and honorary secretary and treasurer of the Police Aided Association for Clothing Destitute Children. Such civic and philanthropic responsibilities demonstrated James’ commitment to civic service, rather than party, during the inter-war years. Experienced and knowledgeable in municipal and police administration, James was also proficient in debating technical details of traffic-calming measures and the financial repercussions of the “Geddes Axe” on police pay and rate stabilisation.27 Meanwhile, Walter Ernest Wilford, a boot and shoe factor, was a member of Leicester watch committee for over thirty years, serving as vice-chairman (1928-34) and chairman (1934-47). A Labour stalwart, Wilford served as the local party’s chief whip (1914-22). He also chaired the health, education and general purposes committees, then served as lord mayor in 1934. As with James, Wilford was expert in “police” administrative and technical policy networks. He was appointed Leicester’s representative on the AMC’s police committee in 1928 and forged close working relations with William Hincks, secretary to the Leicester Charity Organisation Society and the longest serving member on the watch committee - over thirty years - before his retirement in 1936.28 Wilford and Hincks, the latter a staunch Liberal and avowed anti-socialist, overcame factionalism through a shared civic vision of inclusivity and policy learning. They served together on numerous subcommittees, made joint visits to other cities and the Home Office, either to obtain information or defend Leicester’s independence from central regulation, and dominated watch committee proceedings through their cumulative experience and expertise.29

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The watch committee was, of course, not simply the product of strong personalities and interpersonal relations, but was part of the wider system of municipal government and partially subject to the structures and relationships prevalent within English and Welsh county boroughs after 1888. The persistence of the committee and departmental structure, the coordinating role performed by the town clerk, the financial scrutiny of the finance committee and the close working relations between committee chairman and chief officer, created a complex and bureaucratic web of rational interactions, yet, according to Harold Laski, the committee remained “the pivot of … local government”. Policy was debated within the council’s meetings, but “each principal committee … [tended] to go its own way, almost as an independent authority”.30 Undoubtedly, there existed scope for party influence, although this was greater in parliament where clearly delineated parties debated and voted upon general policy issues, rather than relying on the committee system for policy-making. Indeed, this was reinforced by suggestions that the committee was the “semi-autonomous fiefdom” of its chairman, whose role as figurehead included representing the committee, positively, to both the council and the ratepayers.31 The watch committee chairman was responsible for maintaining mutual understanding amongst members, controlling any rivalries based on party, or factional loyalties (however infrequent) and coordinating policy, vertically, between the committee and its subcommittees and horizontally, by serving on other committees with overlapping interests, notably the finance, traffic and water committees. The procedure for electing chairmen differed between the Birmingham and Leicester watch committees. As it was council policy to share patronage, the former rotated the chair every three to five years, on average, although this did not follow a strict party rotation. The latter, whilst pursuing a similar course until the 1890s, elected the most experienced member of the committee between 1901 and 1939. Whilst Birmingham’s fire brigade and judicial32 subcommittees demonstrated greater stability in the duration served by their chairmen during the same period, rising from 2.1 and 2.6 years respectively to 4.8 years, Leicester watch committee (and its fire brigade subcommittee) had only four different chairmen in 38 years, with the average length of office being 9.5 years (table 3.2). In all cases election was based on nomination and majority voting. There were few recorded cases of conflict emerging within the nomination process; one case in Leicester, in 1934, involved councillors Hill and Minto (both Labour) proposing Taylor (Conservative) as vice-chairman to Lovell (also Conservative). Lovell and Fortey

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(Labour) proposed Hincks (Liberal). Taylor was elected on a majority vote.33 Clearly, factions were not automatically dictated by party loyalties. Table 3.2: Average length of office of watch committee chairmen (years), 1870-1939 Committee 1870-1900 1901-39 Birmingham watch committee 2.7 2.5 Leicester watch committee 2.7 9.5 Birmingham fire brigade subcommittee 2.1 4.8 Leicester fire brigade subcommittee 2.5 9.5 Birmingham judicial subcommittee 2.6 4.8 Source: Leicestershire Record Office (hereafter LRO) CM42/10-32, Watch Committee Minutes (hereafter WC Mins); Birmingham City Archives, WC Mins (unreferenced).

The motioning of resolutions reinforced the limitations of party politics. Although similar figures are unavailable for Birmingham due to differences in recording conventions, the increasing proportion of resolutions motioned and seconded by representatives from different parties on Leicester watch committee demonstrates that bi-partisan voting exceeded partisan voting (table 3). Single party and bi-party motions accounted for approximately equal numbers of tabled and recorded motions between 1901 and 1921. From 1926, however, bi-partisan motions accounted for two-thirds and upwards of those recorded, peaking at almost eighty per cent in 1938. Furthermore, the high percentage of Conservative-Labour motions, rising from less than fifteen per cent from 1916-21 to between a third and two-thirds during the 1930s, indicated the important dynamics of routine committee business. Many of the motions had little to do with pre-determined voting strategies and were concerned with technical or administrative decisions, such as accepting the minutes of subcommittees, verifying estimates and accounts or accepting recommendations tabled by the chief officer. Those few issues where partisan voting occurred concerned pay and working conditions of the rank-and-file although these were frequently constrained by fixed national scales during the 1920s, especially for the police. Only then did Leicester’s Liberal and Conservative members combine their voting powers to block any moves to undermine the operational authority of the police, as was the case with a baton charge by the police against unemployed demonstrators outside the city’s poor law offices in September 1921 which led the Labour members to demand a public enquiry into the alleged brutality of the action. The defence of the senior officer present at the incident - that someone in the crowd had thrown stones at the building and that he had ordered his men to

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“disperse” the “mob” - was accepted at face value by a majority who were relieved that “good order” had been quickly restored.34 Elsewhere, as with the controversial appointment of policewomen in Leicester in 1929, Labour members led by Emily Fortey, the first female member of the watch committee, skilfully negotiated with others to overrule the chief constable’s opposition to appointing women, thus avoiding party conflict.35 Aside from a limited number of ideological issues, therefore, the majority of a watch committee’s work was contingent on inter-party interactions and bargaining around the committee table. Table 3.3: Party Political Resolutions on Leicester Watch Committee, 1901-38 Single Party Motion Year Bi-Party Motion (%) Sample (%) 1901 54.6 45.5 33 1906 55.5 1911 55.8 1916 41.9 1921 51.5 1926 47.3 1931 33.7 1935 32.8 1938 20.7 Source: LRO CM42/19-32, WC Mins.

44.5 44.2 58.1 48.5 52.7 66.3 67.3 79.3

74 149 43 68 55 89 104 29

The proliferation of subcommittees from the 1890s further diluted partisan influences on policy-making. The accumulation of functions throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the subdivision of administrative labour on both watch committees, with particular policy networks placed under the responsibility of subcommittees who usually met prior to the full committee to which they would report. Leicester watch committee, for example, co-ordinated the work of ten permanent subcommittees between 1900 and 1939 dealing with the fire brigade, street lighting, general purposes, police uniform, accounts, traffic, cinema inspection, public buildings, Sunday trading and emergencies. A further 21 ad hoc subcommittees were constituted between 1918 and 1938 to investigate single issues, including the purchase of a police car, the appointment of policewomen, and the creation of a police box system in 1931. Although Birmingham watch committee was slower to devolve responsibilities to subcommittees, by 1926 it had formally constituted separate subcommittees for police and fire brigade

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accounts, street collections, and special contingencies. Moreover, Birmingham’s judicial and fire brigade subcommittees, formed in 1870 and 1872 respectively, served for longer than many standing committees and were duly regarded as prestigious and authoritative. As late as 1946, Birmingham’s town clerk, Frank Wiltshire, defended the devolution of powers to subcommittees, contending that this helped the “municipal machine” work “at reasonable speed.”36 The integrated structure and membership of the watch committee and its subcommittees created an exclusive administrative environment in which members defended their integrity and expertise from external criticism, freely interacted with chief officials and further diluted partisan influence. Policy was the result of institutional interactions, rules, procedures and experienced personalities, rather than party machines coordinating policy form and presentation. Committee loyalty overrode ideology and was strengthened by the collective memory and mutual solidarity of members. The decision of the Labour members of Birmingham watch committee, for example, to support the committee’s controversial policy of retaining senior officers beyond their statutory retirement age, despite pressure from sections of the local and national party, demonstrates that civic service itself remained an overarching factor in seeking membership of prestigious committees.37

Central-local relations and police policy The reform of the police system in 1919, which transferred additional powers to the Home Office in return for substantial exchequer support, magnified tensions between central and local government.38 This culminated in the cross-party mobilisation of local councillors against this encroaching influence through the medium of the Association of Municipal Corporations. The scholar, Herman Finer, subsequently identified an inherent conflict between the Home Office, which demanded greater mutual co-operation between local forces and standardisation of working practices, and watch committees who “have come to regard their government as a privilege which ought not to be taken away or modified”.39 Senior civil servants, however, were often keen to placate powerful watch committees by stressing the evolutionary nature of police reform and the dual structure of local administration. In 1928, Edward Troup, under-secretary of state in the Home Office (1908-22), identified a dual structure of responsibilities that had “grown up naturally, adapting itself from time to time in changing conditions.”40 The primary legal duties of the police constable were the suppression of crime and maintenance of

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order. As was accepted by local and national politicians and administrators, these were matters of law, not of policy; operational decision-making was the sole ambit of the chief constable by the 1920s and most watch committees accepted this.41 “Police policy”, on the other hand, referred to “the means and methods of carrying out these duties and to the preparations to be made for doing this effectively”.42 This involved the recruitment, remuneration, promotion and discipline of police officers, recurrent and capital expenditure and administrative practices which ensured that the police could undertake their legal responsibilities efficiently and economically. Supported by Troup’s replacement as undersecretary, John Anderson, (1922-32), and Leonard Dunning, chief inspector of constabulary, Troup identified a two-tier system of watch committee administration, arguing that “it is only in the greater and stronger municipalities that the watch committee can be relied on to recognise the practical limits to its own jurisdiction”.43 The watch committee was responsible, therefore, for administering the police efficiently and economically, without abusing its powers and status. Thus, whilst a municipality could not be held liable for a constable’s misuse of his powers, as ruled in the Fisher v. Oldham case (1930), where a man attempted to sue Oldham Corporation for wrongful arrest, it could sue for damages where a constable was injured through the actions of a negligent third party, as in the case of Bradford v. Webster (1920). Here a constable had been injured by the defendant’s steam wagon.44 Although the Home Office was able to co-ordinate national “police policy” by the 1920s, the recognition that the police remained “a branch of local government” and, as embodied in the Police Act, 1919, that the Home Office “has no more essential duty than in consultation” with local authorities, the magistracy and chief constables, culminated in watch committees maintaining important administrative responsibilities.45

Conclusion Labour did not dominate local politics in the Midlands before 1938, yet it could present itself as a party of efficient and economical municipal government by participating in bi-partisan alliances which contributed to its gradual increase in representation on watch committees. Those historians, however, who contend that the party machine had evolved to become the single biggest determinant of local policy, neglect the importance of individual personalities, structures and administrative conventions. Watch committee administration was contingent on interactions between structure and agency. Moreover, civic, party and

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professional loyalties co-existed. Each was predominant at different times and in different contexts. In regions with more pronounced social conflict, such as South Wales and Merseyside, it is possible to detect changes in “police policy” towards industrial relations (both in terms of the control of picketing and police unionism itself) and unskilled migrant labour.46 Further research would shed light on whether any similar changes in watch committee administration were due to party influences, or bi-partisan concerns with instability. Local and national politics were interdependent while local and central government cohabited in the “national world of local government,”47 yet the enduring influence of localism on “macro” policy-making and “micro” implementation into the inter-war years, challenged assumptions about the ‘nationalisation’ of local government. Local politics and administrative structures did not merely mirror those of central government. In particular, the committee system rendered local government a decentralised and heterogeneous, yet civic-centred, entity and the relations prevalent within municipal administration reflected the realities of central-local tensions and routine administrative behaviour.

1

The research for this chapter was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council Research Studentship and Postdoctoral Fellowship. 2 For example, Mike Savage, “Urban Politics and the Rise of the Labour Party, 1919-39”, in Lynn Jamieson and Helen Corr eds., State, Private Life and Political Change (Basingstoke, 1990), 204-23; Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class. London, 1840-1940 (London, 1994), 82-5; Lewis Baston, “Labour Local Government 1900-1999”, in Brian Brivati and Richard Heffernan eds., The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Basingstoke, 2000), 449-55. 3 The “Geddes Axe” was the programme of public expenditure cuts named after Sir Eric Geddes, the chairman of the committee on national expenditure. 4 John Garrard, “Urban Elites, 1850-1914: The Rule and Decline of a New Squirearchy?”, Albion, 27 (1995), 583-621; William Rubinstein, “Britain’s Elites in the Inter-war Period 1918-30”, Contemporary British History, 12 (1998), 1-18. 5 R.H. Trainor, “Urban Elites in Victorian Britain”, Urban History Yearbook (1985), 1-17; Garrard, “Urban Elites”, 607-8. 6 B.M. Doyle, “The Structure of Elite Power in the Early Twentieth-century City: Norwich, 1900-35”, Urban History, 24 (1997), 179-99; R.H. Trainor, “The ‘Decline’ of British Urban Governance since 1850: A Reassessment”, in R.J. Morris and R.H. Trainor eds., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond Since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000), 33; Nick Hayes, Consensus and Controversy: City Politics in Nottingham 1945-1966, (Liverpool, 1996), 17-37; H. Mathers, “Sheffield Municipal Politics 1893-1926: Parties, Personalities and the Rise of Labour”

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(Ph.D. diss., Sheffield University, 1979), 35-39; Shane Ewen, “Power and Administration in Two Midland Cities, c.1870-1938” (Ph.D. diss., Leicester University, 2004), 67-97. 7 David Reeder and Richard Rodger, “Industrialisation and the City Economy”, in Martin J. Daunton ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain vol. III 1840-1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 553-92. 8 John Davis, “Central Government and the Towns”, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 280; Shane Ewen, “Central Government and the Modernization of the British Fire Service, 1900-38”, Twentieth Century British History, 14 (2003), 317-38. 9 William A. Robson, “The Central Domination of Local Government”, Political Quarterly, 4 (1933), 85-104; G.D.H. Cole, “The Future of Local Government”, Political Quarterly, 12 (1941), 405-18; C. Webster, “Conflict and Consensus: Explaining the British Health Service”, Twentieth Century British History, 1 (1990), 121-33; J.F. Wilson, “The Motives for Gas Nationalisation: Practicality or Ideology”, in Robert Millward and John Singleton eds., The Political Economy of Nationalisation in Britain, 1920-50 (Cambridge, 1995), 150-2; James ForemanPeck and Robert Millward, Public and Private Ownership of British Industry, 1820-1990, (Oxford, 1994), 290-94. 10 Brian Keith-Lucas and Peter. G. Richards, A History of Local Government in the Twentieth Century (London, 1978), 199-203; Phillip J. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England 1850-1914 (Oxford, 1983), 251-52. 11 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1968), 213-19; James Moore, “The Transformation of Urban Liberalism: Liberal Politics in Leicester and Manchester 1885-1895” (Ph.D. diss., Manchester University, 1999), 26-28. 12 The importance of revenue raising to local government is raised in Robert Millward and Sally Sheard, “The Urban Fiscal Problem, 1870-1914: Government Expenditure and Finance in England and Wales”, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 501-35. 13 Simon Gunn, “Ritual and Civic Culture in the English Industrial City, c.18351914”, in Morris and Trainor, Urban Governance, 237. 14 Peter Jones, “Office Holding Politics and Society: Leicester and Peterborough, c.1860-c.1930” (M.Phil diss., Leicester University, 1983). 15 John Gyford, “The politicization of local government”, in M.D. Gelfand, Martin Loughlin and Ken Young eds., Half a Century of Municipal Decline (London, 1985), 81-83. 16 Sue Goss, Local Labour and Local Government: A Study of Changing Interests, Politics and Policy in Southwark, 1919-82 (Edinburgh, 1988), 15-32; Martin J. Daunton, “Payment and Participation: Welfare and State-formation in Britain 1900-1951”, Past and Present 150 (1996), 194. 17 Birmingham Mail, September 28, 1929; Leicester Mail Yearbook (Leicester, 1922), 39. 18 Nick Hayes, “Civic Perceptions: Housing and Local Decision-making in English Cities in the 1920s”, Urban History, 27 (2000), 211-33.

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Martin J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914 (Cambridge, 2001), 300-1; Margaret Dupree, “The Provision of Social Services”, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 388-93; Ewen, “British Fire Service”, 324-31; Kenneth Newton, Second City Politics: Democratic Processes and Decision-Making in Birmingham (Oxford, 1976), 12; Keith Laybourn, “The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate”, History, 80 (1995), 209-26. 20 Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (Oxford, 1896), 154; R.J. Morris, “Externalities, the Market, Power Structure and the Urban Agenda”, Urban History Yearbook (1990), 103-5; B.M. Doyle, “The Changing Functions of Urban Government: Councillors, Officials and Pressure Groups”, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, 290-92. 21 Genevieve Massard-Guilbard, “The Urban Catastrophe: Challenge to the Social, Economic, and Cultural Order of the City”, in Genevieve Massard-Guilbaud, Harold Platt and Dieter Schott eds., Cities and Catastrophes/Villes et Catastrophes: Coping with Emergency in European History / Réactions face à l’Urgence dans l’Histoire Européenne, (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 18-19; Francis Bell and Robert Millward, “Public Health Expenditures and Mortality in England and Wales, 1870-1914”, Continuity and Change, 13, (1998), 237; Shane Ewen, “The Internationalization of Fire Protection: In Pursuit of Municipal Networks in Edwardian Birmingham”, Urban History, 32 (2005), 288-307. 22 This was a common process replicated in most Midlands county boroughs, although a few, including Coventry, established a separate fire brigade and water committee. 23 For example, Birmingham City Archives (hereafter BCA), Watch Committee Minutes (hereafter WC Mins), 1 December 1874, 81-85; City of Leicester, Published Minutes of Council (Leicester, 1892), 505-7; Published Minutes of Council (Leicester, 1934), 29-31. 24 Although the watch committee chairman was a de facto member of the finance committee, and invariably a major influence on budgetary policies. 25 Sam Davies and Bob Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919-1938 vol. I (Aldershot, 1999), 223-26. 26 Clive Emsley, “Policing the English Frontier”, H-Urban Book Reviews, accessed at www.h-net.org/~urban/, March 26, 2003; Carolyn Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community (London, 1984), 41-47. 27 For example, National Archives, HO45/22834/400530/19, Minutes of Police Council meeting, February 8, 1923. 28 Hincks also served on the AMC’s police committee from 1925-28. 29 Ewen, Power and Administration, 164-65. 30 Harold J. Laski, “The Committee System in Local Government”, in Harold J. Laski, William I. Jennings, William A. Robson eds., A Century of Municipal Progress, (London, 1935), 82; I. G. Gibbon, “Some Problems of Local Government”, Public Administration, 9, (1931), 102; M. Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols (Berkeley, California, 1978).

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31

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James Moore and Richard Rodger, “Municipal Knowledge and Policy Networks in British Local Government, 1832-1914”, Yearbook of European Administrative History, 15 (2003), 11-12. 32 The judicial subcommittee was responsible for all areas of police administration. Most members of the watch committee were automatically appointed members owing to its prestigious position. 33 Leicestershire Record Office (hereafter LRO) CM42/30, WC Mins, 13 November 1934, 310. 34 Ibid CM42/24, WC Mins, 16 February 1915; LRO CM42/26, WC Mins, 18 October 1921; 15 November 1921; LRO CM42/28, WC Mins, 16 April 1929; Ben Beazley, Peelers to Pandas: An Illustrated History of the Leicester City Police (Derby, 2001), 119-20. 35 Ewen, Power and Administration, 167-71. 36 Quoted in Fire, 1 November 1946, 94. 37 Ewen, Power and Administration, 81-82. 38 Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2nd ed. (Harlow, 1996), 160-70; Chris A. Williams, “Rotten Boroughs? How the Towns of England and Wales Lost Their Police Forces”, in James Moore and John Butland Smith eds., Corruption in Urban Politics and Society: Britain, 1780-1950 (Aldershot, 2007). 39 Herman Finer, “The Police and Public Safety”, in Laski, Jennings and Robson, Century of Municipal Progress, 284. 40 Sir Edward Troup, “Police Administration, Local and National”, Police Journal, 1, no. 1 (1928), 17. 41 The main exception was St Helens watch committee, where senior members attempted to challenge the chief constable’s authority over operational practices during industrial unrest in 1926. The chief inspector of constabulary ultimately intervened to protect the chief constable’s legal autonomy. 42 Troup, “Police Administration”, 15. 43 Ibid; Minutes of Evidence of the Committee on the Police Service of England, Wales and Scotland (Parliamentary Papers 1920, XXII), 36; John Anderson, “The Police”, Public Administration, 7 (1929), 192-202. 44 Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review, 92, no. 3 (1928), 711; Justice of the Peace and Local Government Review 94, no. 5 (1930), 132-35. 45 Anderson, “The Police”, 192-93; Home Office Departmental Committee, Report of the Departmental Committee on Detective Work and Procedure, vol. I (London, 1939), 15-16. 46 Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain 1906-1926 (Oxford, 1991). 47 R.A.W. Rhodes, The National World of Local Government (London, 1986).

CHAPTER FOUR LANCASHIRE PUBLIC ASYLUM PROVISION: REGIONAL CO-OPERATION, LOCAL RIVALRY 1 AND FACTIONAL INTEREST, 1889-1914 BOB HAYES

During the second half of the nineteenth century, anxieties about the perceived problem of “lunatics”, “idiots” and “inebriates” grew rapidly,2 along with a belief that existing legislation and arrangements for the provision of asylum accommodation were inadequate. In parallel with legislative responses to the “problem”, including three major statutes within a period of just twelve years, significant developments in local government took place.3 The establishment of Lancashire County Council afforded a potential opportunity for countywide co-operation in asylum provision. This chapter examines public provision during the period from the formation of the county council in 1889 until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Initially, it will outline the background issues; widespread anxieties, legislative responses and local government developments. Subsequent sections will examine a range of factors facilitating, shaping or inhibiting co-operation within the county palatine. Factors examined will include: economic prudence, the influence of political and professional elites, the roles of rivalry, factional interest, civic pride and the impact of competing responses to the nature and scale of asylum provision. Finally, future research options and outline conclusions will be considered.

Background In 1816, Lancashire county justices built the first public asylum, at Lancaster Moor. During the ensuing decades three further asylums were opened, at Prestwich (near Bury, 1851), Rainhill (near St Helens, also 1851) and Whittingham (north east of Preston, 1873).4 During the second half of the nineteenth century, local and national elites became

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increasingly concerned about the perceived problem of lunacy. Between 1859 and 1909, the population of England and Wales doubled in size yet, during the same period, the number of “persons of unsound mind” quadrupled.5 Figure 1 shows the number of people detained in public asylums, workhouses, voluntary hospitals and private facilities (divided into pauper, private and criminal categories), at ten-yearly intervals.6 Between 1859 and 1909, the number of private patients increased from 4,679 to 9,844, an increase of 210 percent which approximated to the growth in the general population. In contrast, the number of “pauper lunatics” grew from 31,401 to 116,730 during the same fifty-year period, an increase of 372 percent. The growth in the number of “criminal lunatics” during this period, from 682 to 1,017, actually represented a decline in proportion to the general population.7 The Education Act, 1870 facilitated the identification of imbeciles and idiots amongst children but improved surveillance methods do not appear to have tempered perceptions of an inexorable growth in the number of persons of unsound mind. Figure 4.1 Persons of unsound mind reported and under care: England and Wales 1859-1909 140,000 120,000 100,000 80,000

Pauper Private

60,000

Criminal

40,000 20,000 0 1859

1869

1879

1889

1899

1909

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This growth alarmed elites and activists of all political hues. The philosopher and writer, Herbert Spencer, adhered to Lamarckian and Social Darwinist analyses, while the Social Democratic Federation’s Henry Hyndman advocated a Marxist class analysis although both viewed with alarm, the threat of “mental degeneration”.8 Following persistent lobbying by (mainly lay, rather than medical) activists, the government established the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded in 1904. Political and social elites viewed feeble-mindedness, the inebriate problem and lunacy as significant and distinguishable threats to “national efficiency” and “the race”. The working classes and the poor shared these anxieties, particularly regarding lunacy and idiocy. Andrew Scull noted that asylum-based solutions were: of particular importance to the poor for whom, under existing conditions, the difficult and troublesome sorts who were institutionalised would otherwise have formed a virtually intolerable burden.9

Inebriety became a growing concern in the second half of the nineteenth century. The British Medical Association, the Social Science Association and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children campaigned for new legislative measures10 and the Home Office Departmental Committee on Inebriates recommended strengthening the powers of police and magistrates.11 These anxieties form part of a continuum, stretching from the 1860s to the 1930s. Notwithstanding the vigorous libertarian and/or radical opposition of a few individuals, notably Josiah Wedgwood MP,12 detention-based policies enjoyed considerable support across the political spectrum and class divides. Legislation can be seen as a response to elite and/or electoral concerns and is part of a process, rather than an isolated action. During a period of less than thirty years, legislators responded to the foregoing anxieties with five major statutes: the Idiots Act 1886, the Lunacy Act 1890, the Inebriates Act 1898, the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act 1899 and the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. Control and management were the primary aims of the legislation, which marked the triumph of legalistic over medical solutions. The lunacy and idiocy legislation did not define curative responses, which remained a matter for the emergent psychiatric profession. Only the inebriate reformatories had a legally defined curative function; compulsory work and discipline. While the County Asylums Act 1808 was merely permissive and the County Asylums Act 1853 placed only limited obligations upon county justices,13 it was the Lunacy Act 1890 that imposed a specific “obligation to provide Asylums.”14 Cumulatively, the legislation was wide-ranging but, at times,

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ambiguous. Specific legal distinctions between lunacy and idiocy had been defined in the Idiots Act 1886 but these were superseded just four years later by the Lunacy Act 1890 which, confusingly, stated that “‘lunatic’ means an idiot or person of unsound mind”. The distinction between two quite different conditions became blurred once more, while legal ambiguity and confusion in patient provision continued well into the twentieth century.15 Throughout the period from 1889 to 1914, legalistic procedures expanded the state’s role in managing “persons of unsound mind” and those deemed to be at what Mark Jackson has aptly termed “the borderland of imbecility”.16 These changes were paralleled by legislation (including the Municipal Corporations Act 1882 and the Local Government Act 1888), which defined the status, powers, and limitations of local government. Furthermore, the Public Works Loans Act 1898 ensured that local government had the authority and, potentially, the means to pursue local policies, including the building and maintenance of asylums. Although obliged to make provision, the annual reports of the Commissioners in Lunacy reveal that local authorities (including Lancashire) were often tardy in meeting their obligations.17 In this climate of widespread concern about lunatics, idiots and inebriates, central government developed legalistic and detention-oriented remedies. Nascent local authorities were empowered and implored to deliver these remedies.

Lancashire: Co-operation or Conflict? Lancashire County Council was the second largest local authority in the country and its relationship with the county boroughs and municipal and district councils was complex.18 Tensions arose over pragmatic issues, such as the setting of rate precepts, while competition for prestige and status also created friction. J. M. Lee observed that the formation of county councils was: in a sense the revenge of the towns against the country gentlemen who, since the fifteenth century at least, had been interfering in the business of the boroughs.19

Lunacy, idiocy and inebriety legislation did not require, or even facilitate, the establishment of countywide boards to undertake its implementation. Indeed, Lancashire needed to promote specific local legislation to transfer responsibilities and powers vested in local authorities to the countywide boards.20 What were the factors encouraging or hindering countywide development in this competitive and often contentious relationship

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between the different tiers of local government? It will be argued that major factors included; the quest for economic prudence, the influence of political and professional elites, the role of rivalry, civic pride and civic individualism.

Economic Prudence Minimising expenditure was a priority for county elites, both before and after the formation of Lancashire County Council. The quest for economy manifested itself in various ways, including economies of scale, the use of patient labour and the “trade” in out-county patients. The ultimate “economy” of county justice administration was, simply, not to provide asylum accommodation. However, section 238 of the Lunacy Act 1890, which obliged local authorities to provide asylum accommodation, was, in part, a response to the tardiness of some county justices in meeting their obligations under the County Asylums Act 1853. From the inception of Lancashire County Council, cost-saving proposals in asylum provision were mooted. Suggestions included common purchasing of all county asylum supplies and consideration of joint provision with Derbyshire County Council, for “idiots and imbeciles” aged less than eighteen years.21 The perceived benefits of co-operation clearly appealed to Lancashire County Council. In March 1890, it convened a conference of its representatives and those of the fifteen Lancashire county boroughs, to consider collaborative asylum provision. The conference recommended establishing an asylums board. A draft Bill was prepared and, when debated by the county council, there was just one dissenting voice, whose opposition was based solely on a belief that the proposal would be more expensive than existing arrangements.22 Under the provisions of the Lancashire County (Lunatic Asylums and Other Powers) Act 1891, the Lancashire Asylums Board (LAB) came into being just eighteen months after the Lunacy Act 1890 entered the statute book. This joint body assumed the obligations of the participating local authorities and took over responsibility for existing county asylums at Lancaster Moor, Prestwich, Rainhill and Whittingham. As the growing numbers of long-term, chronic patients came increasingly to concern the Asylums Board, expansion of asylum accommodation was an early priority. The LAB expanded accommodation on existing sites, prepared plans and sought authority to construct a fifth asylum. The chosen location was in the south of the county, at Winwick, near Warrington. The new asylum opened in 1901 and just three years later it accommodated 2,000 patients.23 In 1898, an Epileptics and

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Imbeciles Committee was established, as a subcommittee of the LAB to consider future provision. By 1905, when the LAB’s inmate population had reached 10,612 persons, plans were in hand for the construction of a sixth asylum specifically, for “epileptics and imbeciles”.24 A site near Whalley, in East Lancashire, was selected and construction commenced in 1912. Interrupted by military use during the Great War, it finally opened as Calderstones Certified Institution, in 1921.25 All the Board’s asylums were large (four had accommodation for over 2,000 inmates) and had extensive grounds, enabling future expansion. Moreover, with their farms and “industries”, most were largely selfsufficient as well as contributing towards treatment regimes which, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, had seen work (especially work outside, in the fresh air) as therapeutic. Leonard D. Smith has noted that other benefits of such work included, “inculcation of order and routine” and: equally important, for the pauper lunatic, work was to become a primary means for keeping the asylum patient in touch with a key role of a member of his class of society—that of worker.26

Patient labour also served a pragmatic purpose; that of reducing costs in asylums and mental deficiency institutions. In the inebriate reformatory, compulsory labour and discipline were viewed as both the “cure” and costsaving measures. Across all institutions, inmates performed both “service” and “production” work. They cleaned the wards, maintained the grounds and worked in the laundries and kitchens. They also worked on the farms and produced commodities for consumption on site, or for sale on the open market. Whittingham Asylum, for example, regularly sold a range of products including turkeys, cream and willows; discarded materials (even “a quantity of old bags”) were also offered for sale by tender.27 Inmate labour was of such economic significance that it influenced the choice of location for the LAB’s sixth institution. Amongst other reasons, the Whalley site was chosen for the suitability and quantity of local clay for the production of bricks. These were to be used in the construction of the institution and a permanent brickworks was subsequently established where the patients worked. In 1914, the LAB supplied male inmates from Whittingham Asylum to dig the earthworks for alterations to the railway branch line when the partially-completed Calderstones Certified Institution was made available to the War Office. The financial settlement for work undertaken was complex, involving the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, the War Office, Messrs Parkinsons (the building firm constructing the institution) and the LAB. Although a commercial

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arrangement, the inmates were not paid for their work.28 It is evident that the combination of size and self-sufficiency were significant benefits of countywide co-operation, delivering economies unachievable in smallscale borough asylums. The government’s legislative response to the pressing “inebriate problem” was the Inebriates Act 1898. In what Stefan Petrow described as the “more punishment-hungry 1890s”,29 punitive measures against inebriates attracted wider political support than regulatory measures against the licensed trade, brewers and distillers.30 Again, Lancashire County Council responded promptly to the legislation and convened a conference in June 1899. A committee of county council, county and noncounty borough representatives was formed to develop proposals. In 1900 the (clumsily titled) Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board Act received the royal assent and the Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board (LIAB) was established. At its first meeting, it agreed to construct three reformatories; two for women and one for men.31 By 1890, drunkenness accounted for thirty-seven percent of all female crime.32 Female habitual drunkards were viewed as a particularly serious problem due to their disruptive influence upon family life. Despite the LIAB’s initial enthusiasm, only one reformatory was built, the Lancashire Inebriate Reformatory (for women), at Brockhall, in the east of the county. Work was the “cure” and was compulsory for all who were capable. In 1908, the Reformatory Director, Dr Frank A. Gill (subsequently a long-serving medical superintendent at Calderstones), informed the LIAB that, “All the industries do well and continue to keep the women fully occupied”.33 Table 4.1 provides a summary of employment for the quarter ending May 1908, revealing that 125 of a total of 133 inmates (94 percent) were employed and only eight were incapable of work.34 Costs were significantly reduced as inmate labour virtually eliminated the need for ancillary staff other than skilled artisans. Furthermore, the productive output of inmates contributed to a genuine self-sufficiency in a number of products, including some types of clothing and a variety of foodstuffs.

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Table 4.1 Employment of inmates at the Lancashire Inebriate Reformatory, May 1908.35 Occupation Number Occupation Number Housework 20 Garden 8 Kitchen 19 Dairy 2 Laundry 34 Farm 5 Charring 11 Total productive 125 Dressmaking 4 Punishment 0 Mending room 8 Senile debility 2 Rug room 3 Isolation 1 Sewing room 8 Sick 5 Wood chopping 3 Total unproductive 8

When county justices administered asylums, it was common practice to admit out-county inmates whose “home” county, parish, or union paid for their maintenance. The charge levied was significantly higher than the actual cost of maintenance. After the formation of the LAB, the number of out-county patients declined sharply as Lancashire inmates took almost all accommodation. Nonetheless, the “trade” continued into the twentieth century and was particularly evident at the Brockhall Reformatory where, in 1908, ninety-eight of 151 inmates were from London.36 London County Council’s Farmfield Reformatory, with a capacity for approximately one hundred inmates, was insufficient for the capital’s needs and as a result arrangements were made with other reformatories (including Brockhall) for the detention of its inebriates.37 Subsequently, Brockhall began to admit the feeble-minded category of patient, a consequence of two developments. Firstly, after 1908, London County Council terminated the contract whereby Brockhall housed some of the former’s inebriates.38 Secondly, the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 embraced some categories of “habitual drunkard” previously subject to the provisions of the Inebriates Acts 1879-1900.39 Although the general impression is of efficient financial management, ratepayers were not always well-served by the parsimony of the joint boards and committees. The Commissioners in Lunacy, for example, recommended external auditing of asylum stockholdings, but the LAB rejected what it called, “the Commissioners’ desire to force upon the Board the expense of employing an outside auditor”.40 This policy exposed asylums to the risk of staff dishonesty going undetected. In December 1906, James Thomas Cheetham, the Clerk and Steward at Lancaster Moor Asylum, was gaoled after conviction on five specimen charges of defalcation. The asylum’s total loss was estimated to be £800. Subsequently, the Commissioners remarked tersely:

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Chapter Four It remains to be seen what course the Lancashire Asylums Board will now take to place the auditing of accounts of their various Asylums upon a proper business footing.41

In 1898, the county council’s contribution to the Asylums Board was £31,992 0s. 0d., which amounted to 6.3 percent of the Council’s overall budget. It was the third largest expense for the county after main roads and police, which together accounted for sixty-five percent of expenditure.42 By 1914, the county’s combined contribution to the Asylums and Inebriates Acts boards of £38,113 12s. 5d., represented only two percent of its budget.43 Despite this decline in expenditure as a proportion of the overall budget, economies were continually sought. Provision was characterised by rigid control of expenditure and the exploitation of any opportunity to raise income through patient labour or the boarding of outcounty patients when spare capacity was available. Kathleen Jones observed that: Many asylums found it easier to get inmates to contribute to the smooth running of the institution than to decant them into the outside world.44

Thus, the curative role of the asylum was frequently subordinated to fiscal priorities.

Elites: Political Newly-created county councils drew-in existing elites and offered an arena for new political and professional elites to develop their influence and status. A feature of the early decades of Lancashire County Council was the long tenure of its chairmen and county clerks, whose roles will now be assessed. Political elites enjoyed a growing legitimacy, based on the combination of new local government structures and the enlarged franchise. The county council had just two chairmen during the first thirtytwo years of its existence. Sir John T. B. Hibbert held the office from 1889 until 1908. A barrister by profession, he was chairman of the Furness Railway and Liberal MP for Oldham. He held ministerial posts under Gladstone at the Treasury and Admiralty and served terms as chairman of the Poor Law Board, the Municipal Corporations Council and the County Councils Association. Locally, he served on the Asylums Board throughout his county council service, was chairman of the Inebriates Acts Board from its inception and chairman of the Central Committee of the (voluntary) Royal Albert Asylum, Lancaster, from 1890 to 1908.45 Hibbert exemplified the county leader who also operated in the national political

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arena. His successor was Liberal colliery-owner, Sir William S. Barrett, who served from 1908 to 1921. He was chairman of the Asylums Board (1900-1908) and the Standing Joint Committee (1899-1921), which, although principally responsible for police matters, also inspected the accounts of private asylums.46 By 1914, in addition to places on the two boards, the Mental Deficiency Committee and the many subcommittees, there were a further 165 places on the visiting committees of the county’s asylums. An examination of committee memberships, in 1898 and 1914, reveals that county council representatives on the Asylums and Inebriates Acts boards tended to be members of other committees concerned with social and welfare issues, such as the Health, Housing and Education committees. Curiously, very few county councillors and aldermen appear to have served simultaneously as members of both the Asylums and Inebriates Acts boards.47 Anecdotal evidence relating to county borough representatives on the two Boards, suggests that their main, if not exclusive, interest was minimising the cost to their respective ratepayers.48 Evidently managing provision for lunatics, idiots and inebriates was a significant aspect of county politics at all levels. The role of party within Lancashire County Council was relatively limited before the Great War and contentious issues did not produce divisions, necessarily, along party lines.49 This was reflected in the limited competition in county council elections. The first election (1889) saw 38.1 percent of divisions contested, significantly fewer than the 56.3 percent average for England and Wales. In 1907, just 1.9 percent of divisions were contested and, even after the emergence of the Labour Party, only 11.5 percent were contested in 1913.50 John Garrard noted that: There were in fact few party-wide programmes—and economists and activists could normally be found on either side of the divide, regardless of the predominant emphasis of their parties. …. As often as not, there was no defined party line.51

Although the first county council chairman was a Liberal, the limited role of party is illustrated by the election of the Conservative, C. R. Jacson, as the first vice-chairman.52 Given its subordination to personality during much of this period, the role of party politics is difficult to assess. Nonetheless, it is worthy of further study.

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Elites: Professional The principal administrative figures responsible for asylum provision were the county clerks, clerks to the boards and committees and medical superintendents. As administrators, they were servants of the county, but to what extent could they influence the countywide agenda? Two county clerks dominated the early years of the council. Sir Frederick Campbell Hulton served from 1889 until 1899 and had previously been clerk of the peace for the County Palatine of Lancaster. When the county council was created he was appointed to the new post of county clerk, while retaining the clerkship of the peace. He was appointed as clerk to the LAB on its formation.53 Sir Harcourt Everard Clare succeeded him in 1899, serving until 1922. Previously, Clare served at Liverpool Corporation, where he gained experience of municipal enterprise while overseeing the corporation’s acquisition of tramways and street lighting undertakings. At Lancashire County Council, he amassed a powerful array of offices, including county clerk, clerk of the peace and the clerkships of the Insurance and Education committees. He was clerk to the Asylums Board, the Inebriates Acts Board, the Mental Deficiency Committee, legal adviser to two river authorities and he served on two Royal Commissions.54 This combination of prominent positions provided the county clerks (especially Clare), with a potentially powerful position from which to influence countywide asylum policy. Clare became a forceful local government administrator, whose dominance was subsequently resented by some elected representatives.55 Of the forty county council officers listed in the 1898-99 Year Book, twelve were asylum officials.56 By 1914 the number of council officers had risen to fifty-nine, with the number of asylums and (by this time) reformatory officials growing to eighteen, at a time when joint boards and committees were responsible for five asylums (with construction of a sixth under-way) and the inebriates’ reformatory.57 Senior professionals responsible for the organisation and management of asylums, therefore, formed a significant proportion of the county administration. Historical research into the role of medical superintendents has mostly explored treatments, medical and psychiatric developments, with only limited attention given to the superintendents’ significant administrative responsibilities. Two national bodies sought to promote superintendents’ collective interests. The Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane was established in 1841 and renamed the MedicoPsychological Association (MPA), in 1865. The lowly status of the psychiatric profession compared to physicians and surgeons is evidenced

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by the fact the MPA did not receive a royal charter until 1926.58 Nonetheless, it achieved some success in establishing national training and qualification schemes for asylum attendants through which (by the first decade of the twentieth century) 500-600 staff qualified annually.59 The other body representative of asylum superintendents was the Asylum Workers’ Association (AWA), founded in 1895. It sought to unite medical superintendents and asylum staff into a single body, which Mick Carpenter has described as, “very close to what in private industry would be called a company union”. Although recruiting across all ranks, superintendents dominated its leadership.60 It campaigned for legislation to compel asylum authorities to provide staff pensions. This was achieved when the Asylum Officers’ Superannuation Act 1909 established a nationwide contributory pension scheme. However, Lancashire Asylums Board employees (amongst others) were already provided with a non-contributory scheme that offered superior benefits. Within a year of the Act entering the statute book, the National Asylum Workers’ Union (NAWU) was formed by Lancashire attendants, as an independent trade union. Ironically, the AWA’s successful campaign for superannuation legislation was a major contributor to the rapid growth of the NAWU, leading to its own decline and its dissolution by 1919.61 Lancashire’s asylum rules isolated superintendents, geographically and socially. Outside practise was prohibited and superintendents required written permission before leaving the asylum for more than one night.62 Isolation was further reinforced by the promotion policies of the boards and visiting committees, which, almost invariably, appointed from within an asylum; a policy that was subsequently criticised severely by the Board of Control.63 Mathew Thomson suggests that mental deficiency superintendents, in particular, “turned inwards to seek status through efficient and economic management as overlords of huge institutional domains”.64 Lancashire’s medical superintendents jealously guarded their autonomy and authority within the asylum but despite their number, appear to have had little direct influence on broader county administration. Further research is required, however, before drawing firm conclusions. The stability and continuity of the political and administrative leaderships and their interest in asylum matters, ensured that the county council was well-placed to pursue its objective of countywide provision. Party politics played only a minor role and there was stability amongst the political leadership. As an administrator, Clare occupied a key role on all the committees and boards during a period of rapid expansion. Whether the burgeoning asylum bureaucracy could be managed and directed by one individual, even one as well placed as Clare, requires further research. In

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sharp contrast, medical superintendents, who were geographically and socially isolated, seem to have exercised little influence at countywide level.

Local rivalry and civic individualism Rivalry and factional interest took various forms, including challenges to the type of provision, the apportionment of cost, disagreements over the validity of the “solution” and civic individualism. Disagreements about the nature and cost of countywide provision caused tension between the different tiers of local government administration, which was particularly evident when major expenditure was proposed. Misgivings about cost were amongst reasons cited by the County Borough of Oldham for its decision not to participate in the Inebriates Acts Board. Mayor John Hood stated: His experience of county administration was that it was very expensive, and his experience of lunatic asylums and other things showed that county administration was extremely extravagant.65

In 1905, the county boroughs of Bolton and Bury, along with the Lancashire Association of Urban District Councils, formally opposed construction of a sixth asylum on the grounds of cost.66 Periodically, disagreements about the nature and value of provision arose. The County Borough of Oldham, having taken an initial interest in the inebriate reformatory proposals subsequently concluded that the Inebriates Act 1898 was fundamentally flawed. The Mayor declared: The [Inebriates] Act did not touch the people it was intended for. A man must be a quasi-criminal drunkard … before any demand could be made to reform him in an inebriates’ home.67

He advocated, instead, the reduction of the number of inns and beerhouses in the town. Oldham, thereafter, severed its connection with the Inebriates Acts Board proposals.68 In 1891, the County Borough of Blackburn developed plans for a borough asylum and withdrawal from the LAB. The Blackburn Corporation Act 1892 empowered it to spend £50,000 constructing an asylum on a forty-acre plot of land that it had acquired for the purpose.69 Possessing its own asylum was a matter of civic pride for Blackburn, as one councillor noted, “they would be completing their municipal government”.70 Blackburn’s motives were also financial, as it anticipated the boarding of out-borough and private patients would make the asylum a net contributor to the borough rate fund.

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Furthermore, the borough would no longer contribute to the LAB.71 Despite extensive preparations, including visits to borough asylums at Ipswich and Plymouth, the engagement of architects and preparation of detailed drawings, the corporation abandoned its plans in March 1894 as it no longer believed that a borough asylum would be profitable.72 Although “joint bodies proliferated more than in the case of any other county”,73 Lancashire County Council did not, unreservedly, regard them as a panacea. It subordinated the interests of municipal and county boroughs and the urban and rural districts, to its own, while purporting to represent countywide interests. In 1902, Clare prepared the Lancashire County (Lunatic Asylums) Bill whereby the precept formula based on rateable value was radically altered to a user-based formula which secured significant savings for the county council. Blackburn’s town clerk responded, on behalf of his authority and the county boroughs of Bolton, Liverpool and Wigan, declaring their opposition to the changes.74 When the Bill received royal assent in June 1902, tensions heightened and by November, Bolton and Liverpool were considering withdrawing from the Board.75 Pragmatic policies were based on what was to the county’s advantage. Its opposition (in 1901) to the Stalybridge, Hyde, Mossley and Dukinfield Joint Tramways and Electricity Generating Board Bill, illustrates this pragmatism. The county council’s petition to parliament claimed that the four local authorities’ proposals were “prejudicial to their [the county’s] property rights and interests”,76 asserting that the county council was “the only authority to represent the county rate-payers and the inhabitants of the county”.77 Civic rivalry between the different tiers of local government appears to have been shaped, largely, by pragmatic financial concerns, rather than ideological differences. The Blackburn councillor, who spoke of a borough asylum “completing their municipal government”, qualified his statement with the rider that it should not “add another unnecessary burden to the already heavily-laden rates”.78 Although civic pride is evident, it appears to have been mainly a matter of rhetoric.

Further Research and Conclusions A case study of Lancashire, alone, cannot provide sufficient evidence to draw general conclusions about asylum policy developments in the urban-industrial areas of England and Wales. This chapter has endeavoured to provide “signposts”, to guide future research which may follow two broad courses; widening comparative research and undertaking detailed, in-depth research. Widening research could explore comparisons

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with other geographical areas, for example, comparison of Lancashire’s countywide co-operation, with that of the West Riding of Yorkshire (also managed by an asylums board) or a comparison with the West Midlands, where provision was dominated by Birmingham’s county borough asylums. Useful historical insights could be gained by comparison of provision in densely and sparsely populated areas, for example, comparing Lancashire with Cumberland. Comparative studies of charitable and public provision in the north west also merit research, given that voluntary institutions offered an alternative, albeit smaller-scale, regional provision. Comparisons of the organisational aims and objectives of asylums and other closed institutions (in relation to Erving Goffman’s thesis and more recent studies), would further contribute to historical understanding.79 Detailed studies of specific aspects of countywide provision might include an examination of the “trading” of out-county patients by public asylums, developing the themes of William Parry-Jones’ work which focused on private madhouses.80 As noted earlier, the administrative role of asylum superintendents remains largely unexplored. Finally, the growing influence of professional administrators and their relationship with elected representatives, warrants further study.81 This chapter has sought to explore factors shaping co-operative development of Lancashire’s public asylum provision. The combination of elite anxieties, enabling legislation and expanding local government structures, provided an opportunity for countywide responses to the perceived problem of “lunatics”, “idiots” and “inebriates.” Co-operative development, however, was by no means inevitable. The Lancashire Asylums Board, the Mental Deficiency Committee and Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board were subject to, and created, both co-operative and competitive tendencies. Civic individualism emerged from the new, and often competing, tiers of local government and co-operative proposals were challenged. These tendencies were evident in the county council’s changes to the rate precept, Oldham’s condemnation of the Inebriates Act 1898 and Blackburn’s proposals to build a borough asylum. The boards and committees did cement a degree of countywide co-operation, but it was always conditional and the evidence suggests that it could be jeopardised by local, pragmatic and, especially, financial, considerations.

1

This chapter is a development of papers presented at the Conference of Regional and Local Historians at the University of Teesside, 11 September 2003 and the Lancashire Local History Conference at the University of Central Lancashire, 29

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November 2003. I am grateful to Professor Patricia Garside, Mr John Garrard and Dr Barry Doyle for their comments on earlier drafts. 2 The terms “lunatic”, “idiot” and “inebriate” are contemporaneous with the period addressed by this chapter. “Inmates” were detained in “asylums”, “certified institutions” or “reformatories”. In order to retain clarity and maintain consistency with primary sources the terminology of the era is used non-pejoratively throughout. 3 Mark Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble-mind in late-Victorian and Edwardian England (Manchester, 2000); Kathleen Jones, Asylums and After - a Revised History of the Mental Health Services: from the Early Eighteenth Century to the 1990s (London, 1993); Stefan Petrow, Policing Morals: the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1994); Roy Porter ed., The Faber Book of Madness (London, 1991); Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain, c. 1870-1959 (Oxford, 1998). 4 Patricia L. Garside and Bruce Jackson, Model Guide to Lancashire Mental Hospital Records (Salford, 2000), 21-27. 5 Jones, Asylums and After, 115. 6 Data from: Commissioners in Lunacy Forty-Third Report for the Year 1889, 613; Board of Control First Annual Report for the Year 1914 (Part II), 1-4. Due to the entirely different legal, judicial and medical processes leading to their identification and detention, the number of criminal lunatics cannot be compared like-for-like with pauper or private categories. 7 Ibid. 8 Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (2nd edition), (London, 2002), 54-7. 9 Andrew Scull, “The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era”, in Andrew Scull ed., Madhouses, Mad-doctors and Madmen: the History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era, (London, 1981), 16. 10 Petrow, Policing Morals, 221. 11 Ibid, 216. 12 Wedgwood was a vociferous opponent of much of the mental deficiency legislation proposed in the first half of the twentieth century. See Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency, for coverage of the parliamentary debates. 13 Andrew Roberts, Mental Health History Timeline, Middlesex University at: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/sshtim.htm (accessed 19 April 2004). 14 Lunacy Act 1890, S. 238. 15 Jones, Asylums and After, 120. 16 Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility. 17 Commissioners in Lunacy Forty-Sixth Report for the Year 1892, 52, noted a general shortage of accommodation and overcrowding at Prestwich and Whittingham asylums; Commissioners in Lunacy Fiftieth Report for the Year 1896, 18, noted the Lancashire Asylums Board had only twenty-six vacancies and that many lunatics requiring asylum care were presently detained in workhouses.

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Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency, 18. J. M. Lee. Social Leaders and Public Persons: a Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888, (Oxford, 1963), 47. 20 Lancashire County (Lunatic Asylums and Other Powers) Act, 1891; Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board Act, 1900. 21 Lancashire Record Office (hereafter LRO), CC/LAM, Lancashire County Council Lunatic Asylums Committee Minutes, 18 April 1890 and 23 March 1891. 22 Councillor Guthrie quoted, Lancashire Daily Post, 11 December 1890, 2. 23 Millicent Regan, A Caring Society: a Study of Lunacy in Liverpool and South West Lancashire from 1650-1948, (Rainhill, 1986), 69-70. 24 Gillian Hall and Susan O’Malley, “The Early History of Calderstones: an Institution for Mental Defectives”, in Alan Duckworth ed., Aspects of Blackburn, (Barnsley, 1999), footnote 4, 145. 25 Ibid, 133-5. 26 Leonard D. Smith, Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England, (Leicester, 1999), 227. 27 Data from LRO, HRW34/1, Whittingham Asylum Cuttings Book. 28 I am indebted to Brian Haworth for this information contained in a chapter on which he is working: “The Calderstones Branch”, 4, unpublished [n.d.], and a file of documents relating to the history of the railway branch. 29 Petrow, Policing Morals, 216. 30 Ibid, 181-2. Petrow quotes A. J. Balfour (Prime Minister, 1904) who declared, “A great laxity is introduced into our notions of morality if we habitually transfer the gravamen of the crime from the man who commits it to the man who tempts it”. 31 LRO, CC/IM.2, Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board Minute Book, 28 August 1900. 32 Petrow, Policing Morals, 220-21. 33 LRO, CC/IM.2, Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board Minute Book, 4 June 1908. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 LRO, CC/IM.2, Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board Ninth Annual Report, 20, (printed report pasted into Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board Minutes, 351). 37 Petrow, Policing Morals, 231. 38 Ibid. 39 Mental Deficiency Act 1913, S. 2 (1). 40 Commissioners in Lunacy Sixty-First Report for the Year 1907, 67. 41 Ibid, 69. 42 LRO, CCT/10, The Accounts of the County Treasurer and the Other Officers of the County Palatine of Lancaster 1897-98, Preston, Lancashire County Council, 1898, v. 43 LRO, CCT/26, The Accounts of the County Treasurer 1913-14: Part III, Preston, Lancashire County Council, 1914, 2 and 19. 44 Jones, Asylums and After, 120. 19

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W. Burnett Tracy, Lancashire at the Opening of the Twentieth Century, (Brighton, 1903), 154; J. D. Marshall, “Biographical Notes”, in J. D. Marshall ed., The History of Lancashire County Council, 1889-1974, (London, 1977), 388. 46 Marshall “Biographical Notes”, 388-9. 47 Data from LRO, CCY.8, Year Book 1898-99; CCY.24, Year Book 1914-15. 48 Blackburn, Bolton, Liverpool and Wigan were opposed to changing the rate precept formula. Bolton and Bury opposed the construction of a sixth asylum. Oldham declined to join the Lancashire Inebriates Acts Board. Blackburn proposed to build its own borough asylum. All these policies were (wholly or partially) adopted in the pursuit of economy. 49 D.T. Denver and H.T.G. Hands, “Politics to 1929” in Marshall, The History of Lancashire, 71-2. 50 Ibid, 45; Lee, Social Leaders, 228. 51 John Garrard, The Functions of Nineteenth Century Political Parties, Occasional Papers in Politics and Contemporary History, No. 1, (Salford, 1986), 12-13. 52 Denver and Hands, “Politics to 1929”, 54. 53 Marshall, “Biographical Notes”, 395. 54 Ibid, 395-6; Preston Herald - Supplement, 7 March 1922, 3. 55 Preston Herald, 25 March 1922, 3, recorded that at a meeting of the Lancashire Asylums Board “Alderman Bowes (Manchester) said he was very strongly opposed to duplicating appointments such as were held by the late Sir Harcourt, whose positions were too multifarious.” For similar critiques about Glasgow see Irene Maver, “The Role and Influence of Glasgow’s Municipal Managers, 1890s to 1930s”, in R. H. Trainor and R. J. Morris eds., Urban Governance: Britain and beyond since 1750, (Aldershot, 2000). 56 LRO, CCY.8, Year Book 1898-99, 73-77. 57 LRO, CCY.24, Year Book 1914-15, 58-67. 58 Royal College of Psychiatrists at: http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/info/archives/archlinks.htm (accessed 28 June 2004). 59 Mick Carpenter, Working for Health: the History of COHSE, (London, 1988), 32. 60 Ibid, 38-9. 61 Ibid, 40-1 and 79. 62 LRO, HRBc.22/4, Institution Rules for the Government of Calderstones, Blackburn, Lancashire Mental Deficiency Act Committee, 1920. Rule 1 required medical superintendents to live at the institution and prohibited outside practice. Rule 5 required them to obtain written permission from the Visiting Committee chairman, or vice chairman, for absence in excess of one night and consent from the Visiting Committee for absence in excess of one week. 63 Board of Control Twelfth Annual Report for the Year 1925, 20. 64 Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency, 147. 65 Oldham Standard, 7 July 1899, 3. 66 Hall and O’Malley, “The Early History”, 134. 67 Oldham Standard, 7 July 1899, 3.

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Oldham Local Studies Library, KJ, County Borough of Oldham Minutes, November 1899-April 1900, 17 January 1900. 69 Blackburn Corporation Act 1892. 70 Blackburn Times, 7 April 1894, 5. 71 Blackburn Community History Library (hereafter BCH), P22BLA, Blackburn County Borough Minutes 1891-92, 21 September 1891. 72 BCH, P22BLA, Blackburn County Borough Minutes 1894, 15 March 1894. 73 J. D. Marshall, “The Growth and Range of County Services”, in Marshall, History of Lancashire, 26. 74 LRO, CC/HBM.2 Lancashire Asylums Board Minutes, 28 November 1901. 75 Ibid, 7 November 1902. 76 LRO, CC.CCP.41, SHMD Tramways and Electricity Board, Petition of Lancashire County Council, S. 9. 77 Ibid, S. 3. 78 Blackburn Times, 7 April 1894, 5. 79 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, (Harmondsworth, 1968). For an assessment of factors shaping the historiography see John C. Burnham, What is Medical History? (Cambridge, 2005). 80 William L. Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: a Study of Private Madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, (Toronto, 1972). 81 For the role of professional administrators in urban authorities, see Maver, “Glasgow’s municipal managers”.

CHAPTER FIVE COUNCIL WARS: MANCHESTER’S OVERSPILL BATTLES PETER SHAPELY

The problem of Victorian inner city slums dogged British cities for three quarters of the twentieth century. Conditions for millions were truly dreadful. From the east end of Glasgow to the east end of London, people had to suffer unhealthy, overcrowded slums. The scale was, at times, overwhelming. For much of the century local councils and increasingly central government sought to resolve the problems. A variety of solutions were put forward, with varying degrees of success. This chapter will look at one idea, the overspill estate, which became most popular (especially in Manchester) after 1945. With the onset of the Second World War, came a fresh determination to sweep away the slums and create a brave new world. After 1945 it was decided that over half of Manchester’s housing needs had to be met with overspill estates. The only problem with this grand vision was that the land came under the jurisdiction of other local authorities. Although some expressed sympathy for Manchester, many local councils did not relish the idea of having thousands of slum dwellers still under the authority of Manchester City Council, living in their neighbourhoods. While housing histories place emphasis on the role of central government, planners and designers, or local government departments in determining policy little has been done on how such clashes between local authorities also played a key role in shaping housing strategies. In the case of overspill it was crucial. Council wars seriously affected the ability of local authorities to fulfil their ambitions. Many factors determined housing policy in post war Britain. Studies have highlighted the pivotal position of central government, of ministers, civil servants, influential planners and architects, ideologies and economic fortunes in providing the lead in the production of housing policy.1 Other studies highlight the ways in which local authorities continued to play an important role in the policy making process.2 Local authorities made

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design choices and decided on the areas where policy was be implemented. Moreover, they were responsible for its subsequent implementation and management. There were many external factors shaping this strategy, especially, government finance and legislation, but it still meant that local government had a great deal of power and influence over housing plans. Importantly, the central-local government relationship was not the only political dynamic affecting policy production. Relationships between local authorities also had an impact on housing strategies. In the immediate post war period, many towns and cities across Britain turned to overspill as a solution to their housing problems, either in the form of new towns or large estates. Overspill was supposed to allow authorities to move slum dwellers out of the cities, freeing up large areas for slum clearance and further development. Some studies have touched on the policy, although most have highlighted the fact that many local authorities abandoned their plans in the 1950s and early 1960s due to political difficulties and the fear of losing both population and income.3 Some local authorities, however, continued to perceive overspill as the only solution. Glasgow, for instance, hoped to provide 60,000 houses in new estates, throughout the 1960s and 1970s.4 Up to the late 1960s, Manchester wanted to solve its chronic housing problems by displacing them in a series of overspill estates. Like other British cities, however, Manchester was to be continually thwarted by other councils in its ambitions to build outside the city.5 This chapter will look at these relations and problems. Two key issues informed the political relationship. First, the local authority struggles were inextricably linked to the urban-rural divide. The tension between town and country had been developing since the inter-war period, with the likes of J.B. Priestly and H.J. Massingham passionately promoting the defence of the rural idyll in the face of expanding urbanisation.6 Second, there was a more fundamental issue of power and authority. Neighbouring local councils would allow some housing developments to take place, but they bitterly resented any notion of Manchester expanding its power at their expense. These concerns led to a series of struggles that had a serious impact on housing policy. Every urban area was faced with overwhelming housing problems after the Second World War. This was partly because of bombing, but due mainly to the truly dire housing stock inherited from the nineteenth century. In Manchester, as in many British cities, the immediate priority after the war was to provide homes for those displaced by bombing raids. In November 1944, the Housing Committee agreed to build 3,000 temporary homes but this was simply papering over the huge cracks.7 The

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1942 Housing Committee Report laid bare the stark reality facing Manchester. It estimated that 68,837 houses were “unfit for human habitation” and that a total of 76,272 houses were required to meet longterm needs.8 The problems were outlined in the council’s 1945 Redevelopment Plan. The City Surveyor, R. Nicholas, claimed that, in many respects Mancunians in 1650 were in a better position to enjoy a healthy life and that about 120,000 houses were so old that they had to be rebuilt in the near future. He painted a grim picture of a life in which people were “condemned to live under a perpetual smoke … which enfeebles the health-giving property of the sun’s rays and lowers our general vitality and ability to resist infection”. Structural defects and overcrowding were a blight for hundreds of thousands in Manchester and nearly a quarter of a million were “huddled together in houses completely lacking in modern amenities - often, indeed, in a state approaching structural collapse”. 9 Former council leader, Bill Egerton later recalled how, after the war and into the early 1960s, the council was confronted with a “mass of bad housing … multi-occupational dwellings which were all unfit … outside toilets, no hot water, some hadn’t even got electric”.10 Post-war expectations, coupled with long-term problems, combined to pressure the local authority into building large numbers of houses as quickly as possible. Bill Egerton claimed that the waiting lists, rather than central government, drove them; that “you were being pressurised by people who were living in crummy conditions, in houses they wanted to get out of … pressure from the housing waiting list”.11 The human need was desperate and pressing. A new council-led and carefully planned world had to be created on behalf of the city’s slum dwellers. Civic pride was to provide further motivation for bold action. Manchester’s councillors had a clear vision - build a “New Jerusalem” of 40,000 homes for inner city slum dwellers, in a series of estates in towns outside the outskirts of the Manchester conurbation, brand new homes in pretty leafy areas, such as North Cheshire. The idea derived from the Garden Suburb movement, developed by Ebenezer Howard and by local exponents, T.C. Horsfall and later Lord Simon. Cottage-style homes built in a clean green area, were meant to provide an idyllic environment for the working classes. In Manchester, Simon’s pioneering work was to take shape in the 1930s with the development of the Wythenshawe estate, a large new development built on the southern borders of the city. A tradition was gradually fashioned which shaped thinking and policy in the second half of the century.12 The Redevelopment Plan outlined this vision. Tower blocks were rejected, in favour of new overspill estates. The Redevelopment Plan stated that, while some embraced “large blocks of .

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flats, with trees, lawns, playgrounds and flower-gardens in between”, the council thought that “it would be a profound sociological mistake to force upon the British public, in defiance of its own widely expressed preference for separate houses with private gardens, a way of life that is fundamentally out of keeping with its traditions, instincts and opportunities”.13 Tower blocks were fine for people “on the continent” but not for the British workers.14 Mancunians were not alone in their dislike of tower blocks. In Birmingham, tenants in the mid-1950s had expressed their dislike of high-rise flats, leading to a temporary reduction in building high-rise in outside redevelopment areas.15 In the 1950s, Southwark, Bermondsey and Camberwell showed limited interest in new building methods, despite encouragement from central government.16 Although tower blocks may have been unpopular, they were a reaction to the problems of meeting demand, whilst being caught in a land-trap. Manchester’s Housing Committee fully understood the need to secure land outside its own boundaries if it were to be successful in implementing its vision. Expansion into other areas would provide the council with the opportunity to maintain its control and influence over its population whilst also freeing up space for inner city development. Councillor Ottiwell Lodge, Chairman of the Town Planning and Buildings Committee, claimed that the biggest problem of all was going to be moving at least 120,000 people to new or existing towns some distance away.17 Land was desperately needed. In 1945, the Housing Committee stressed that, “of all the urgent aspects of Manchester’s post-war housing, there is no doubt that the question of securing land for housing looms very forcibly in the minds of the Housing Committee”.18 Their ambition to develop a new and vastly improved environment for future tenants depended on overspill. They claimed that, if they were to meet the standards they had set themselves, then it was “absolutely imperative that immediate decisive action be taken by the city Council to acquire lands beyond the present City boundaries, to provide houses for the overspill”.19 Manchester came to embrace the policy of overspill more than any other city. Its open hostility to tower-blocks marked it out. It was the only city that embraced it as official municipal policy,20 with Maurice Fizgerald KC, telling a House of Lords Committee that Manchester must “expand or die”.21 The idea of developing new towns had been further developed by the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association and, from 1936, by its campaigning secretary F.J. Osborn, who wanted 100 new towns to help rehouse millions of inner city slum dwellers in clean, green areas. These would be carefully planned with the working man’s cottage as the main housing template. The dispersal of a huge section of the population

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became central to much of the immediate post-war thinking. It was evident in the Barlow Commission Report, which set the standards after the war and in the 1946 New Towns Act, which led to the creation of a series of planned and self-contained towns away from inner city misery. This was followed in 1952 by the Town Development Act which allowed local authorities to pursue their own policy of overspill. Crucially, unlike the New Towns Act, this could not be imposed by any authority but could only be achieved, according to Harold Macmillan, by “orderly and friendly arrangements” and by “agreement and co-operation” between local authorities.22 Moving outside the city boundaries meant creating a new world of quality cottage-style homes and new planned estates in the clean air of rural Cheshire and Lancashire. A large number of houses were successfully completed in surrounding districts. They included the largest, at Langley near Middleton, which was started in 1953 and eventually had 4,500 new homes. The Council had bought land on the Bowlee Estate in 1937.23 Their original plan was to build 8,000 houses on the 550-acre site, but building was delayed until after the war. The Manchester Corporation Bill finally went before the Lords in 1950 and, following the first batch of 696 homes, plans to build 1,000 new homes were unveiled in 1952.24 Many schemes for new estates, however, were fraught with problems. These were underlined by the council’s plans to build large projects at Mobberley, Knutsford and Hattersley (all in Cheshire) and Westhoughton in Lancashire. In March 1946, the Government first raised the possibility of building a new town in Mobberley for between 50,000 and 60,000 people and, in November 1949, Manchester City Council sought powers to acquire 2,650 acres of land there for housing. Lymm came soon after, with Manchester attempting to buy 3,200 acres of land. It was estimated that this could lead to a population dispersal of around 80,000. A number of other ambitious schemes followed. In 1955, plans were unveiled for a large estate in Hattersley, near Hyde. The initial plans included 4,500 new homes for over 20,000 tenants. Three years later, on the other side of the city, Manchester revealed its proposals for Westhoughton. Again, these were ambitious. The council hoped to build 12,300 new homes, which, if successful, would transform the population of the small Lancashire town from 15,000 to 57,000, with further private developments taking it to a massive 78,000 by 1981.25 The plans were typically big, bold and exciting. Council officials had a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve, yet they were soon to be faced with opposition that grew in ferocity as the years passed. Wartime unity,

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together with the dreams and promises of a brave new world for everyone, drifted away as neighbouring local authorities realised the extent of the impact that Manchester’s plans would have on their towns. Cheshire County Council rebuffed the proposals to build new houses at Mobberley and Lymm. A co-ordinated resistance campaign developed, which successfully frustrated Manchester city council. There were many issues at stake, including land values, the preservation of agricultural pastures, the more basic issues of party politics and the imperialist and expansionist nature of “Big Brother Manchester”. Initially, Manchester was confident of success. Victory over its plans for Mobberley appeared to be in sight, when the city obtained permission to purchase land in the area. It had the backing of the Labour government’s Town and Country Planning Minister, Lewis Silken, but a local town meeting and poll of electors rejected the scheme. Opposition spread across Cheshire. The main argument centred on the preservation of quality agricultural land. At a diocesan conference in Chester in 1949, the Bishop of Chester, Dr. D.H. Crick, expressed his fears, stating that if there was any county in England where agricultural land should be carefully safeguarded then it was Cheshire. He believed that it was “very disturbing when one heard of suggestions that some of the most fertile acres should be commandeered for new housing estates”.26 Cheshire Life lamented that it was no good giving people homes if they could not have food and that new towns of 40,000 people each in areas “properly belonging to cows and corn is a desperately serious matter”.27 Cheshire resident, Morton Forrest, claimed that a large influx of new tenants would destroy the county’s contribution to the nation’s food supplies and would strike at the roots of “England’s heritage, the land and its people”.28 In 1953, the Cheshire branch of the National Farmers’ Union formed a fighting fund of £5,000 to cover their costs in opposing Manchester’s plans.29 When they took their fight to the public inquiry, they were joined by the County Council, other local authorities, the Cheshire County Landowners’ Association and a number of farmers. Leading figures in planning and land utilization, Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Professor Dudley Stamp, were brought in to strengthen their argument by supporting the case for preserving the land, in the interests of farming and green belt protection.30 It proved to be a powerful defence. In October 1954, Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing and Local Government, refused to allow Manchester permission to carry out large-scale developments at Mobberley and Lymm. In a letter sent by the Ministry to the Council, he stressed that the main reason for his decision was the agricultural value of the land and because it was important to preserve “Manchester’s natural green belt”.

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The Minister believed that “it would be wrong to allow development in either place if that can be avoided”.31 Manchester felt that it should not be avoided at any price. At a local Town and Country Planning conference held in the city and attended by 80 local authorities, the Council warned that they would “never give-up” in their determination to get the “green acres of Cheshire of Mobberley and Lymm for its slum suffering families”.32 Alderman R.E. Thomas warned the Cheshire delegates that Manchester could not relinquish its claims on the two towns and that, even if they failed in the short term, they would be forced by circumstances to continue pressing.33 Cheshire’s politicians, however, were unmoved. Alderman Howard Robinson claimed that Manchester was not fully developing the sites already available in the city and that it should develop these sites, before launching out on good agricultural land before it was necessary. Equally unmoved, the city officials were quick to answer. Alderman Thomas pointed out that only “one and a half per cent of the total arable land of the county was needed for housing development” and that “this loss of agriculture could be met by increasing efficiency”.34 The issue of agricultural land was also raised when Manchester unveiled its proposals for a large overspill development of 4,500 new homes for over 20,000 tenants in Hattersley, near Hyde, in North-East Cheshire. When, in 1955, the proposals for the estate won a narrow victory in the local council, one of the objectors claimed that “Hyde will lose its farmlands and become one vast built-up area. The folds we have referred to with affection will go”.35 Interestingly, the plans for Hattersley did not have the same county-led backlash. The loss of farmlands was no longer seen as an adequate argument. Besides, Hyde was a Labour area with a large working-class population and Cheshire County Council was prepared to accept the development. They were not to be moved, however, on the issue of overspill in the affluent middle-class districts of Mobberley and Lymm. Manchester’s attempts to fight back were to be frustrated. Cheshire County Council produced proposals to create a green belt designed, in the opinion of the city, just to stop Manchester from getting housing land at Mobberley and Lymm.36 The Tories had built a brick wall, against which the Labour Council failed to make any impression. On the defence of Cheshire, Tory unity was never stated in public but, as early as October 1954, following the initial refusal by Macmillan to allow building at Lymm and Mobberley, Duncan Sandys, the Minister for Housing, received a brief private note from someone inside government, signed, “Sir Robert”, exclaiming, “all my congratulations: and you have done it alone!”37 He

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described the struggle as the “dark days of (a) war,” fought between Labour-controlled Manchester and Tory Cheshire. Sir Robert wrote to Sandys again the following day expressing his fears that Manchester would continue with what he repeatedly described as their “war of nerves” against Cheshire.38 Civil servant, Evelyn Sharp had actually agreed that Manchester should be allowed one of the two big sites, preferably at Lymm, but Macmillan had refused.39 With the Tories in power, Manchester faced an uphill struggle. In July 1958, the Ministry turned down yet another application. The inquiry, carried out by Ramsay Willis Q.C, reiterated the case made by Cheshire’s agricultural lobby.40 In a draft minute to the Prime Minister, Henry Brooke admitted that, “to be candid, I do not think that Mr. Willis’ report is of the first quality” and that it was not as thorough and cogent a piece of reasoning as he would have liked.41 Officials agreed privately that much of the Willis report was open to criticism.42 Nevertheless, the Tory government supported the findings and, once again, turned down Manchester’s application. Vested partisan interests were operating behind the scenes. In 1959, The Times accused the government of keeping Manchester away from Mobberley and Lymm in deference to the Conservative voters of Cheshire.43 Party politics was an important feature, although the issue is complex, even contradictory. Generally, Labour local authorities were more receptive to the idea of overspill. In Westhoughton, the controlling Labour group on the local council tried, desperately, to sell the idea to the community. Manchester’s councillors were not prepared to give way on overspill, being the main thrust of their housing policy. Initial proposals for Westhoughton had been unveiled in 1958 and had been met with a cautionary welcome by some local councillors. Following his 1958 inquiry and recommendations about Lymm, J. Ramsay Willis, QC told the government that Westhoughton might be the best area for Manchester overspill. Once again, the plans were extremely ambitious, with Manchester hoping to build 12,300 new homes. If the plans succeeded then the population of the small Lancashire town would have increased from 15,000 to 57,000, with further private developments taking it to a massive 78,000, by 1981.44 The reaction to these plans caused a bitter split inside the town. One local councillor, Mary McIntyre, claimed that the new Westhoughton would be a “thrilling place in which to live, work and play”.45 In the local party newssheet, The Labour Member, she hit back at letters in the local press attacking the proposals, claiming that she had not found any constructive ideas, just a lot of “windy criticism”. She heralded this as a bright new dawn for the town, with new shops, facilities and jobs, claiming that “maybe it is too big, too visionary, too magnificent for some

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to imagine” but that it was all “too human, too glorious, too magnificent an idea to be destroyed by men with no vision in their souls”.46 Voices of reason were soon marginalised. The political backlash left blood on the carpet. Supported by the Chamber of Commerce and Ratepayers Association, some local residents and councillors formed the AntiOverspill Association, to campaign against the plans. The 1963 local elections led to the defeat of three Labour councillors in safe seats and loss of overall control for the first time in the history of the council. The local paper pointed out; “everyone agrees that the dominant factor in the result was the attitude towards the Manchester overspill problem”.47 One of the Independent leaders, A.G.Woods, proclaimed that this was a result of the “voice of the people against overspill”.48 The severity of the swing against Labour was highlighted by the fact that, nationally, they were enjoying resurgence in support. The decline of support in a Labour heartland indicated that, while party politics played their part in the council wars, the issue ran far deeper. In 1957, Manchester council organised a meeting of all the city’s MPs in order to produce a combined operation against the government. The idea was to form a united front with the Conservative and Labour MPs for a three-hour parliamentary debate.49 Moreover, it was the Labour Minister of Housing, Richard Crossman, who finally brought an end to the city’s plans for Lymm. Regional loyalties intersected party politics. Westhoughton people were fighting for their town, irrespective of party alignments. Manchester was also fighting its own corner. One of the other objections to overspill had been that Manchester was seeking to expand politically, to become a large, imperial city. As early as 1946, the Manchester Evening News pointed out that “county councils dislike outside authorities having greater power in their counties”.50 In 1950, Councillor Tom Nally, the chairman of the Planning Committee, claimed that they had lost three years and were being continually frustrated in their attempts to build outside the city boundaries because of “jealousy and competition between districts around Manchester”.51 A Cheshire County Council memo of August 1965 pointed out that large-scale overspill “must inevitably have sooner or later a devastating effect on the administrative county”, not only in the loss of rates but on “local government structure itself”.52 It was claimed that “it would be only human nature if Manchester are permitted so deep a bite into North Cheshire” that they would feel “entitled to become the local authority” for the entire region.53 This was a basic issue of territorial power, of who controlled policy, money and manpower. Loss of population would ordinarily mean a subsequent loss of rents and maintenance jobs. Some local authorities,

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such as Liverpool, believed this was too heavy a price to pay and soon dropped the idea of pursuing an overspill policy.54 Manchester’s councillors, however, were not prepared to either abandon the policy or lose control. They were determined to continue to own and maintain the properties with their own Direct Works Department. This secured both jobs and finance. Manchester did not want to dilute its own power base. Bill Egerton stated that “overspills were Manchester houses and we retain ownership”. He admitted that, “basically, it was a bit of intransigence on our part” and that they were “trying to retain Manchester stock for Manchester people”.55 This was to be a major issue as Manchester tried to expand in other areas. The issue of political domination was also raised at Hyde Council’s debate into the proposed Hattersley overspill. Alderman W. Barton alleged that Manchester's objective was a Manchester County Council.56 He added that, “frankly I have never believed it was anything but a stunt on the part of Manchester”, because Manchester intended to use Hyde as a means to “strike down the centre of Cheshire into easier territory less costly to develop. Their objective is a Manchester County Council”.57 Later, the Mayor, Councillor J. Walker, said, “Hyde is being sold down the river on this scheme” while another councillor, A. Jolly, added, “if we are not careful we shall find ourselves governed from Albert Square, Manchester and not from Hyde Town Hall”.58 At the heart of the issue, was control over the new houses and their tenants. Manchester always demanded full control. When the proposals were finally accepted, again, one councillor asked, “why is Manchester going to retain these houses? She has made it clear she will not expect Hyde to take them over. They will remain Manchester property for good”. He pointed out that ten miles from Manchester Town Hall would be a “colony of 10,000 Manchester people in Manchester property” and that “it seems to me Manchester wants to retain them because she is still playing with the idea of a Manchester County”. Bitterly, he concluded, “Cheshire is prepared to write off northeast Cheshire and hand it to south-east Lancashire, the headquarters of which will be this Manchester County”.59 The threat of a territorial take-over also alarmed many in Westhoughton. Objectors to the Westhoughton proposals believed that Manchester was trying to expand its territory at their expense. The Horwich and Westhoughton Journal claimed that arguments about overspill were “inevitably linked up with those about the future of local government in the area”. They stressed that the people of Westhoughton “would prefer to continue under the two tier system of government than to be linked with a new Manchester county”.60 In 1963, the atmosphere

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started to turn ugly. Alderman Quinney leader of the Manchester City Council’s special sub-committee threatened that they would “still go on ourselves if Westhoughton will not co-operate”. The leader of the opposition in Westhoughton, Councillor Davies, retorted, “Alderman Quinney’s comment leaves little to the imagination about the future of Westhoughton under Manchester’s dictatorship”. He asked what they hoped to achieve by “these dictatorial methods” and stated that, for Manchester to “force its will on the people of Westhoughton” did-not reflect any credit on the city and asked them “not to confuse might with right”.61 After the end of a meeting, at which Westhoughton Council officially withdrew its support for the Manchester overspill project, further allegations of dictatorship were levelled against Manchester City Council. One anonymous member unveiled a black and white swastika, which “fluttered gently in the breeze from the flagpole on top of the town hall”.62 Councillor Battersby argued that Manchester was attempting steam-roller tactics. The Bolton Evening News claimed that it was a gesture to “emphasize allegations of dictatorship being levelled against Manchester City Council, whose representatives have threatened that, even if Westhoughton withdrew its support, Manchester would seek to force through the overspill project on its own”.63 The same allegations had been made by Cheshire Life in connection with the proposed development at Lymm. They claimed that the struggle between the two authorities had been nothing less than a “cold-blooded bid for political power and aggrandisement by one very large and very rich community at the expense of another much smaller community (the comparison with Nazi Germany and Belgium is inescapable)”.64 Fears of a Manchester take-over were, in the end, a little exaggerated. Many estates were successfully completed, including Hattersley. It was not the only one. They were able to build a number of overspill estates across the whole region, totalling over 21,000 homes. Some are still owned by Manchester, although a large number have been transferred to receiving local authorities. Nevertheless, the fact remained that, ultimately, the council only completed half of its original target. The overspill wars had left their scars on Manchester’s dreams and ambitions. They were eventually defeated in both Mobberley and Westhoughton. In April 1957, Cheshire County Council hit back with proposals to create a green belt designed, in the opinion of the city, “just to stop the city getting housing land at Mobberley and Lymm”.65 The following year, the Ministry turned down yet another application. The issue rumbled on, until February 1963, when Manchester City Council was finally forced to admit defeat. Smallscale developments had been built around the outskirts of the city, but

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officials were still insisting that they needed a town of 60,000 people.66 Their struggles in Westhoughton fared little better. By March 1965 the battle was all but lost for Manchester. At a press conference in Preston, Richard Crossman announced that he had ordered reprieves for 850 out of 913 houses that the city had tried to purchase. He also greatly reduced the amount of land for future development. Crossman claimed that relations between the warring councils were so bad that it was impossible for Manchester to make any realistic progress. The Westhoughton AntiOverspill Association secretary, Frank Davies, thanked Crossman for his “humane understanding of the position at Westhoughton”, adding that “he has brought a lot of happiness to the people of Westhoughton by the removal of most of the compulsory purchase orders” and “the bitterness and anger displayed, have shown how much the people of Westhoughton felt about the proposal as first put forward”.67 He was, moreover, deeply unsympathetic to Manchester. The genuine sense of enmity and personal hostility had left a deep impression. He claimed that the city Council had “trampled on nearly every town in this part of the North-west with their compulsory purchase orders”, adding smugly, “now they have been put in place by Mr. Crossman - something they never dreamed of - and it gives one encouragement for the future”.68 When the final decision was made, the Anti Overspill Association could not hide their joy, or their condemnation for the City Council, Davies stating “the decision does not cause any great surprise in view of Manchester’s attitude over the years” Councillor Woods adding, “they (Manchester) have wasted a lot of our time … Manchester were facing one way and we were facing the other”.69 Another member of the Association, James Walker, a tenant farmer, also commented, “it proves that Manchester wanted all their own way - all or nothing … they would have used the big stick if they had come”.70 The story of overspill is important in what it tells us about the constraints placed on councils who wanted to build a “New Jerusalem”, but were frustrated by the fact that their vision was not always shared by other local authorities. Of course, the national framework of legislation and finance was still of central importance in determining a great deal of housing policy, but there was still scope for local decision-making. Had Manchester been given the green light by neighbouring councils it would have been far more successful in developing its overspill policy. Local politics, not national, proved the ultimate barrier. All the Council had wanted was to provide the best environment for its inner-city slumdwellers. This meant good cottage style homes, in a decent, leafy town just outside the conurbation. Inspired by lofty ideals, the city Council believed that this was the best way of achieving a new socialist dream. Why should

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inner-city slum-dwellers be denied the type of environment enjoyed by the affluent middle classes? Besides, the city was caught in a serious land trap. There was no land for development inside the boundaries. This, coupled with their aversion to tower blocks, led them to look outside the city. The only problem was that their Manchester council-centred vision had not taken any other views into account. Their idealism was seriously tempered by their desire to retain control of all properties. Neighbouring districts were generally sympathetic, but only to a limited extent. The loss of valuable agricultural land was certainly one issue, but it linked to wider issues about the preservation of the environment and rural or semi-rural middle-class life styles. An influx of thousands of inner-city slum-dwellers would almost certainly have spelt disruption, if not destruction. This was emblematic of the rural-urban split that has characterised much political division, across the country, in the twentieth century. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, similar problems and divisions arose over the expansion of Manchester Airport. Coupled with this, was the issue of power and control. Initially, at least, Manchester had no intention of giving away its population, rents, rates and jobs for its own Direct Works department. Not surprisingly, small district councils felt that they were to be swallowed up by Big Brother. While this chapter has focused on overt political struggles, however, there are other issues that need to be considered and which complicate the political picture, still further. Although rarely stated in public, the fact was that people did not relish the thought of having thousands of inner-city slum-dwellers dumped on their doorsteps. There was an undercurrent of feeling against slum-dwellers that had echoes of the pre-war perceptions of them as socially inferior, even, a little dangerous.71 They were often described as ‘immigrants’, by anti-overspill protestors. Objectors in Cheshire, for example, were deeply worried about the “immigration” of 80,000 Mancunians.72 The Cheshire Life bemoaned the fact that, in Partington, near Lymm, Manchester had “unloaded a large alien community on to a hostile countryside”, leading to an increase in the crime rate.73 Similarly, in a letter published in The Times, Morton Forrest claimed that a projected “immigration of 80,000” would destroy Cheshire’s contribution to the nation’s food supplies and would strike at the roots of “England’s heritage, the land and its people”.74 When Manchester announced its plans for 3,500 houses at Church Coppenhall, near Crewe, villagers protested that it would spoil their nice select village.75 Residents, such as Mr. Bostick, moaned that the new tenants would “ruin the place” while another local, Geoffrey Dale, claimed it was nice and peaceful in the village and “I want it to stay that way”.76 There

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was a similar response from residents in Marple. Over 2,500 signed a petition in protest against a scheme to build 400 houses. Members of the Petitioners Committee, such as Kathleen Moore, exclaimed bluntly that tenants should “go elsewhere” while G.E. Crossley was in no doubt that “the place would be ruined”.77 Slum-dwellers were associated with trouble, with lower standards and, if they were being honest, most people did not want them living in their backyards. When the Hattersley plans were announced, the Mayor, J. Walker, asked, “will this be slum clearance for Manchester?” Walker did not pull any punches. He claimed that “this large immigration” had been strongly resisted in other parts of Cheshire and that Hyde, being a likeable place, would be “altered by people who perhaps come from the slums of Manchester and Salford”. He actually wanted to screen all applicants for the new overspill houses. The Housing Chairman, Alderman E.C. Byle, also expressed fears that Hyde would not only lose its individuality, but that crime and lawlessness would increase and that there was “many a thing that is big and rotten”. While sympathy might be expressed for the plight of the slum-dweller, the fact was that many were fearful about the impact that transferring thousands into small towns would have on their own lives. The Mayor of Hyde was so worried that he even hoped to “make them into good citizens before they come to Hyde”.78 Whatever the reasons for the reluctance of many local authorities to accept overspill, Manchester‘s battles had left them battered and bruised. Their limited successes had serious implications for future housing policy. Manchester’s inability to meet its ambitious targets led to even greater pressure in the demand for slum clearance and new homes. This pressure came from tenants and successive governments. It was part of the reason why Manchester had to look to alternatives, especially to modern systembuilt designs. The Council had to clear its inner city slums then build quickly and economically. Overspill wars had increased the pressure. New concrete developments emerged, such as the Hulme Crescents and the, ironically dubbed, ‘forts’ at Beswick and Ardwick.79 These proved to be huge disasters – a concrete nightmare. There were, of course, other issues that forced Manchester down this path. Central government always provided the lead, finance and legislation. Nevertheless, councils retained a great deal of power and authority, yet even this was curtailed by a series of other factors. The overspill battles highlight one of these factors, adding to our understanding of the complex political relationships that shape policy.

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G. Towers, Shelter is Not Enough: Transforming Multi-Storey Housing, (Bristol, 2000); B. Finnimore, Houses from the Factory: System Building and the Welfare State, London, 1989; P. Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing, Oxford, 1981; L.R. Murphy, ‘Rebuilding Britain: The Government’s Role in Housing and Town Planning, 1945-1957’, Historian, 32 (1970); Paul Taylor, ‘British Local Government and House Building during the Second World War’, Planning History, 17 (1995). 2 See M. Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, New Haven, 1994; K. Young and P. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change, 1837-1981 (London, 1982); Sue Goss, Local Labour and Local Government, (Edinburgh, 1988); J.B. Cullingworth, Housing and Local Government, (London, 1966). 3 See, for example, Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, 158-161. There are few historical studies. Other research is largely limited to contemporary social and political studies, including E. Farmer and R. Smith, ‘Overspill Theory: A Metropolitan Case Study’, Urban Studies, 12 (1975); P. Hall, The Containment of Urban England, (London, 1973). 4 Farmer and Smith, ’Overspill Theory’, 158. 5 Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, 161. 6 See, for example, R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘From Great Wen to Toad Hall: Aspects of the Urban-Rural divide’, Rural History, 10 (1999). 7 Ibid, 398. 8 Housing Committee Report to City Council 1942, 533. 9 1945 Redevelopment Plan, Preface. 10 Interview with Councillor William Egerton, 25 January 2002. 11 Ibid. 12 For the development and importance of civic culture and tradition see P. Shapely, D. Tanner and A. Walling, ‘Civic Culture and Housing Policy in Manchester, 1945-1979’, Twentieth Century British History, 15, (2004). 13 1945 Redevelopment Plan, Preface. 14 Scepticism towards new building techniques continued long after the war. See N. Hayes, ‘Making Homes by Machines: Images, Ideas and Myths in the Diffusion of Non-traditional Housing in Britain, 1942-54’, Twentieth Century British History, 10, (1999); Finnimore, Houses from the Factory. 15 Goss, Local Labour and Local Government, 268. 16 Ibid. 17 1945 Redevelopment Plan, iv. 18 Minutes of Housing Committee, 568. 19 Ibid. 20 Glendinning and Muthesius, Tower Block, 172. 21 Manchester Evening News, 29 March 1946. 22 Hansard, Vol.496, col.725, cited in J.B. Cullingworth, Housing Needs and Planning Policy, (London 1960), 70. 23 Housing Committee minutes, 8 May 1937.

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Manchester Evening News, 17 November 1952. Guardian, 29 October 1962. 26 The Times, 1 June 1949. 27 Cheshire Life, November 1953, 16. 28 The Times, 13 January, 1954. 29 The Times, 7 September, 1953. 30 The Times, 13 January, 1954. 31 The Times, 15 October, 1954. 32 Manchester Evening News, 8 April, 1957. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 North Cheshire Herald, 16 December, 1955. 36 Manchester Evening News, 26 April 1957. 37 Letter from “Sir Robert” to Duncan Sandys, 18 October 1954, HLG 71/2293. 38 Letter from “Sir Robert” to Duncan Sandys, 19 October 1954, HLG 71/2293. 39 Report on Lymm/Mobberley from Evelyn Sharp, 29 October 1954, HLG 71/2293. 40 Letter from Evelyn Sharp to the Town Clerk, Manchester, 15 July 1958, HLG 79/1126. 41 Draft minute to the Prime Minister, HLG 79/1126. 42 Letter from W. Ogden to MHLG, 9 May 1958, HLG 79/1126. 43 The Times, 17 June 1959. 44 Guardian, 29 October, 1962. 45 Ibid. 46 Horwich and Westhoughton Journal, 15 January 1963. 47 Horwich and Westhoughton Journal, l7 May, 1963. 48 Ibid. 49 Manchester Evening News, 4 April 1957. 50 Manchester Evening News, 15 March 1946. 51 Evening Chronicle, 23 March 1950. 52 Guardian. August 12 1965. 53 Ibid. 54 Glendinning, Tower Block, 160. 55 Egerton Interview. 56 North Cheshire Herald, 14 May, 1954. 57 Ibid. 58 North Cheshire Herald, 18 November, 1955. 59 North Cheshire Herald, 16 December, 1955. 60 Horwich and Westhoughton Journal, 1 January 1963. 61 Horwich and Westhoughton Journal, 12 July 1963. 62 Bolton Evening News, 6 August l963. 63 Ibid. 64 Cheshire Life, March 1965, 40. 65 Manchester Evening News, April 26, 1957. 25

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The Times, February 20, 1963. Horwich and Westhoughton Journal, l2 March, 1965. 68 Ibid. 69 Horwich and Westhoughton Journal, 2l October, 1966. 70 Ibid. 71 See the contribution by Bill Luckin below. 72 The Times, January 13, 1954. 73 Cheshire Life, March, 1965, 40. 74 Ibid. 75 Manchester Evening News, 14 November 1957. 76 Manchester Evening News, 14 November 1957. 77 Manchester Evening News, 28 November 1956. 78 North Cheshire Herald, 16 December, 1955. 79 See Shapely et al, ‘Civic culture;’ P. Shapely, ‘Tenants Arise! Consumerism, Tenants and the Challenge to Council Authority in Manchester, 1968-1978’, Social History, 31 (2006). 67

PART III: GOVERNANCE, DISCOURSES AND SPACE

CHAPTER SIX ASSESSING ACCOMMODATION STANDARDS IN THE EARLY VICTORIAN PERIOD GEOFF TIMMINS

Commenting on the quality of working-class housing provision in Britain during the Industrial Revolution period, historians have tended to accentuate the negative although, echoing contemporaries, they have also drawn attention to the marked variation that occurred in the standards achieved. As far as the poorest quality of housing is concerned, they have made much of cellar and back-to-back dwellings, noting that, in some towns, they comprised sizeable proportions of the total housing stock and were often associated with overcrowding, squalor and disease. At the other end of the scale, they have reported examples of model housing provided by some of the more enlightened estate owners and industrialists, which tended to offer better than average facilities, especially with regard to sanitation, constructional standard and appearance.1 The existence of a great deal of poor quality housing can be seen as a powerful weapon in the armoury of those taking a pessimistic view on the impact that intensifying industrialisation had on working-class living standards, even if the argument can easily be overstated.2 Plainly, the conditions in which people lived are a key consideration in relation to the qualitative dimensions of the debate, impacting fundamentally on their health and comfort and on their perceptions of the norms to which respectable members of society should aspire. At the same time, attempting to assess accommodation standards brings into sharp focus the profound difficulties that arise in engaging with qualitative issues in discussions on the standard of living, not only in terms of determining criteria by which judgments can be made, but also of adducing evidence that enables the criteria to be investigated.3 That the pessimistic view on Industrial Revolution period housing conditions has gained historiographical prominence reflects too ready an acceptance of the evidence most commonly used by historians, namely

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that derived from official reports dealing with national and local public health conditions and from other surveys into living conditions that contemporaries chose to make. During the 1830s and 1840s, these reports and surveys appeared in considerable numbers as concern about public health matters grew, interest being stimulated by Britain’s first outbreak of cholera in 1831 and the appallingly high death-rate figures revealed by the introduction of civil registration in 1837.4 The problem with the evidence obtained from these sources centres not so much on matters of accuracy, although this remains an issue, but on its incompleteness. Certainly, some very poor quality housing lacking in basic amenities was to be found at this time, even if those who occupied it and who might be branded as slum-dwellers of the most undesirable type, formed part of lively workingclass communities that provided them with support, protection and identity.5 Yet how representative such accommodation was of the total housing stock in Britain’s towns and villages and how far any deterioration occurred, remain uncertain.6 Both matters require closer investigation, in part by means of a more critical analysis of the types of evidence that have traditionally been used, but also by paying greater attention to other types of evidence that remain under utilised. That derived from field investigation of extant houses and the examination of the photographic record of demolished and altered houses is important in this respect. So, too, is that obtained from large-scale town maps, especially those published by the Ordnance Survey, which are available for some parts of the country from as early as the 1840s.7 The use of this evidence adds substantially to the historical record on which housing historians can draw, permitting much fuller analysis of key criteria by which accommodation standards can be judged, as well as helping to assess the accuracy of the other types of evidence on which they have relied. To illustrate these propositions, a case study of Lancashire housing during the Industrial Revolution period is particularly instructive. In part, this is because the survival rate of houses built in the county during the period is high, at least in rural districts. Much of it has, of course, seen considerable alteration, but major characteristics by which its original quality can be judged frequently survive. And the county’s photographic record helps appreciably in this respect.8 A study of Lancashire housing is also instructive because, unusually, a great deal of evidence relating to it can be derived from the 1840s Ordnance Survey maps. Those published on a scale of 60 inches to the mile are especially useful, since they show details of individual houses and their amenities.9 Unfortunately, they are only available for urban areas which, at the time, had populations of 4,000

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or above, but they do relate to towns within the county that varied considerably in size and geographical location.10 Within the confines of a short article it is impossible to show the full potential that physical and map evidence from the Industrial Revolution period offers in assessing housing quality. Nevertheless, much can be achieved by taking Lancashire’s urban housing as a case study. Drawing on evidence relating to several towns, two approaches are considered using this evidence. One is to assess the reliability of public health report evidence on early Victorian housing quality, both by demonstrating the extent of its incompleteness and by checking its consistency with that of large-scale map evidence. The other is to take the analysis a stage further by considering how far the map evidence itself can be used to shed new light on aspects of housing quality. In so doing, the argument is made that the poor-quality working-class housing so often described in the literature was by no means representative of the whole during the early Victorian period and that, if a clearer picture of working-class accommodation standards at this time is to emerge, much more attention must be paid to assessing the nature and extent of the better-quality housing that was also provided. Since existing assessments on the quality of working-class housing in the early Victorian period rely heavily on evidence derived from contemporary reports dealing with public health, the inadequacies of house sanitation have inevitably received frequent comment. Unwholesome descriptions of ordure-ridden back yards, startling statistics on acute shortages of privy accommodation and nauseating references to highly offensive smells are the standard fare that the reports have to offer. And by way of embellishment, they highlight other housing features that could be seen as health hazards, such as insufficient indoor and yard space for the number of inhabitants, shortages in supplies of clean water, the lack of drainage provision in yards and streets and the limited ventilation that could be achieved with back-to-back and cellar dwellings, as well as with closely-confined court developments. That the compilers of the reports focused on the less wholesome types of housing and public health conditions that could be found no doubt reflects their belief that shock tactics provided the best means of making a case for reform. After all, those in authority both locally and nationally could scarcely take pride in the graphic details of appalling living conditions that were presented to them and it was reasonable to anticipate that enough embarrassment might be caused to galvanise them into action. To take a more considered and balanced approach, on the other hand, would have been to dilute the impact of their findings and would have

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given those opposing reform the opportunity to take a positive view and to argue that things were not really all that bad. Moreover, the policy of emphasising social ills in highly graphic and emotive terms could be seen to have borne fruit in helping to secure the effective reform of factory working conditions, especially with the passage of the 1833 Factory Act. Nor should it be overlooked that the report compilers could readily blame the social and economic ills that they sought to rectify on the unwholesome living conditions that they portrayed, a point that will become more apparent as the discussion unfolds. That the evidence contained in contemporary reports is often highly selective, and needs careful interpretation, can be demonstrated easily from data on privy accommodation. The information given in John Withers’ report on the sanitary condition of Blackburn, published in 1853, is typical.11 Withers, a civil engineer, was surveyor to Blackburn’s Improvement Commissioners and the timing of his report reflected a growing movement within the town to promote economic and social advance, facilitated by a new Improvement Act obtained in 1847 and incorporation in 1851.12 It is evident that Withers was greatly disturbed by Blackburn’s high death rates, which he discussed in some detail in his report, and that he sought to have a wide range of measures introduced that would “bring lasting advantage to the welfare and comfort of the inhabitants …”.13 Amongst those relating to housing improvements were an improved drainage system for the town, a minimum width for new streets, the regulation of lodging houses and the municipal control of water and gas supplies. The Withers’ figures on privy accommodation relate to 53 localities in and around Blackburn. They give the number of dwellings in each location and the number of privies associated with them. Calculating the ratio of privies to houses reveals appreciable variation between the localities. Thus, in several cases, numbers of houses are given with no privies, whereas, to take the opposite extreme, 25 houses in Syke Street shared 12 privies. Overall, 1,165 houses were served by 246 privies, an average of 4.7 houses per privy. No doubt the ideal was for each house to have its own privy, although the question of whether that was the expectation amongst contemporaries is another matter. Much may have depended on the type of privy in question, with greater tolerance being evident if waterclosets were in use rather than privies operated on the conservancy system.14 Withers, evidently in advance of his time, took the view that each house should be supplied with a water-closet, “or the use thereof”, although he was prepared to concede that one water-closet could serve up to three houses.15

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That no details are given about how Withers’ compiled his figures brings concern about their accuracy. But, even assuming they are reliable, the further question arises as to what proportion the houses he surveyed (or had surveyed) formed of Blackburn’s total housing stock. According to Withers, the town contained some 9,600 houses,16 so the privy data relate to only about 12 per cent of them. Put another way, they tell us nothing about sanitation provision in the vast majority of the town’s houses. Why Withers provided such a small sample may have been conditioned by the time available to undertake his survey. Equally, it may be the case that to have added to his data would have produced less striking results. Syke Street, with just short of two houses per privy, is the lowest ratio he records and, as will be made clear in the following section, he could certainly have included numerous houses with their own privies had he been so minded. Scrutiny of the 1840s sixty-inch to the mile maps of Blackburn reveal that much of the housing to which Withers refers was back-to-back; it tended to be concentrated quite close to the town centre and, more particularly, in several streets at the north-eastern part of the town, including Moor Street, Penny Street, Cleaver Street, Lark Hill Street and Starkie Street. (Several of these streets are shown in figure 6.4.) Yet even in these streets the number of houses per privy was 2.7, considerably better than the average for the Withers’ sample. Plainly, there were a relatively small number of localities within the sample that exceeded the average and that were particularly insanitary. They included Water Street, with three privies to 31 houses, Queen Street, with one privy for 17 houses, and Duke Street, with two privies for 14 houses. One other point to make about the Withers’ figures is that several of the localities covered by his survey were in the countryside surrounding the town. The rural houses showed the marked variation in privy accommodation that characterised those in the town and included 34 of the 90 houses (38 per cent) recorded as being without privies. It may be that several houses per privy would not have posed the same level of health hazard in these localities as in the town itself, though much would have depended on the management of the cesspits and middens that, seemingly, would have been provided. Turning to the type of analysis that can be undertaken to assess the accuracy of evidence on housing conditions derived from public health reports, houses that were situated in Queen Street, Preston can be considered. They were described by the Rev. John Clay, Chaplain at Preston Gaol, in 1842. Clay held that nearly all crime could be attributed to three, closely-linked causes - drunkenness, ignorance and poor living

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conditions - so that promoting temperance, education and improved public health were central to his reformist agenda.17 Not surprisingly, therefore, the housing conditions he found in Queen Street shocked him exceedingly. Back Queen-street (south of Queen-street) is approached by several lobbies leading from Queen-street. A visitor, on entering the former, finds himself facing a row of privies, of more than 100 yards long. The doors of the privies are about six feet from the house doors opposite; and the space between one privy and another is filled up with all imaginable and unimaginable filth; so the street consists of a passage little more than six feet wide, with dwelling houses on one side, and a continuous range of necessaries, pigsties, middens, heaps of ashes, &c, &c.; on the other, with a filthy and sluggish surface drain running along one side. The doors opening into this street are, in some cases, the back doors of the Queen Street houses; but 12 houses have their only outlets – doors and windows – upon this disgusting and pestiferous passage.18

There is no way of knowing whether or not the insanitary state of the passage at the time of Clay’s visit was an exceptional circumstance, although the possibility cannot be discounted; presumably it was periodically scavenged, however inadequately. Yet some details noted in the description can be checked against the evidence obtainable from the sixty inch to the mile OS map of Preston, the survey for which was completed in 1847 (figure 6.1).19 The houses to which Clay refers were situated on the south side of Queen Street and the yard that comprised Back Queen Street is marked by the superimposed arrows. The map evidence confirms Clay’s observations that access to and from the yard was via lobbies or passageways – four are shown on the map – and that the passage was about 100 yards long.20 The privies, which are mostly shown as being attached to ash pits (marked as shaded oblongs) were in some cases built back-to-back with privies at the bottom of the yards in Duke Street, the ashpits being shared between neighbouring houses. Altogether, the block of houses comprised 32 units, 12 of which were through houses and 20 back-to-backs. In remarking that 12 of the houses had their only doors and windows opening into the yards, however, Clay implies that there were 24 back-to-backs. The map evidence suggests that some 26 privies were provided for the houses, each of the through houses having its own and the back-to-backs evidently sharing the 14 that remained. Perhaps, in general, each front and back house shared a privy and some backyard space, despite so little being available. What emerges, then, is a high measure of consistency in the evidence that can be derived from the two types of source, only the number of back-to-backs being somewhat at variance.

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Figure 6.1 The Queen Street area of Preston in the late 1840s The Queen Street comparison works well because the time interval between the compilation of Clay’s report and the sixty-inch scale OS map is only a few years, during which time no major changes seem to have taken place. However, where evidence from earlier large-scale maps is available to compare with that obtainable from the OS maps, appreciable change may be noted. Developments at Little Ireland in Manchester provide a case in point. This area gained notoriety as one of Manchester’s worst slums from the vivid description made of it by James Kay in 1833. A portion of low, swampy ground, liable to be frequently inundated, and to constant exhalation, is included between a high bank over which the Oxford Road passes, and a bend of the River Medlock, where its course is impeded by a weir. This unhealthy spot lies so low that the chimneys of its houses, some of them three stories high, are little above the level of the road. About two hundred of these habitations are crowded together in an extremely narrow space, and they are chiefly inhabited by the lowest Irish. Many of these houses have also cellars, whose floor is scarcely elevated above the level of the water flowing in the Medlock. The soughs are destroyed, or out of repair: and these narrow abodes are in consequence always damp, and are frequently flooded to a depth of several inches …

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He noted, too, that the houses were surrounded on every side by large factories, the chimneys of which “vomit dense clouds of smoke, which hang heavily over this insalubrious region”. 21 Kay held the post of Physician to the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary at the time he wrote his report, the publication of which was influenced by Manchester’s first outbreak of cholera in May, 1832. He took the view that the disease could only be eradicated by improving the moral as well as the physical condition of Manchester’s inhabitants, “in such a degree as to remove the predisposition to its reception and propagation …”.22 His pursuit of a moral agenda, which extended to berating adults living in Ancoats and neighbouring districts for spending Sundays “either in supine sloth, in sensuality, or in listless inactivity”,23 echoed that of other middleclass reformers of the period, whose concerns extended to such matters as the lack of privacy available to individuals when large families lived in small houses.24 Nor was Kay alone in linking immigration with poorquality housing conditions. On Kay’s reckoning, the Little Ireland settlement comprised some 200 houses, a figure that the Bancks & Company map of Manchester, surveyed in 1831, confirms.25 As the extract from the map reveals (figure 6.2), about 80 of the houses were situated within the bend of the Medlock to the south of Wakefield Street. The remainder, which are partly shown on the map extract, comprised seven rows each with around twenty houses. They were situated to the north of Wakefield Street and ran parallel to Oxford Road, the main thoroughfare shown towards the eastern edge of the map extract. Both maps confirm that nearly all the Little Ireland houses were back-tobacks that lacked yard provision and were probably highly deficient in privy accommodation. The rows to the north of Wakefield Street were separated by narrower streets than those to the south, giving rise to a development of very high density dwellings.

Figure 6.2. Little Ireland, Manchester in 1831

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Figure 6.3. Little Ireland, Manchester in 1849 Whilst the evidence from Bancks’ map supports Kay’s claims about key aspects of the poor quality of the Little Ireland housing, scrutiny of the 1849 sixty-inch scale OS map reveals that considerable change had occurred (figure 6.3).26 Several of the rows to the north of Wakefield Street had been demolished to make way for The Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Railway and Oxford Road Station.27 Some backto-backs survived in James Leigh Street, Cayley Street and Mary Street, but upwards of half of the Little Ireland housing stock, including, probably, most of the poorest quality housing, had been obliterated. As is well known, demolition of working-class housing by railway companies commonly occurred in major cities during the middle-decades of the nineteenth century, but whether the advantages arising can be seen to have outweighed the drawbacks is a matter of debate, much depending on what happened to those who were displaced.28 The discussion in this section demonstrates that large-scale maps can have high use value in furthering understanding of the evidence on housing quality derived from contemporary reports. The information they provide aids assessment of precisely how selective this evidence is likely to have been, especially in relation to the parts of towns to which reference is being made and the types of housing in question. Additionally, although they cannot shed light on the nature and degree of the squalor that contemporary observers reported, the maps can provide an independent means by which the accuracy of the reports can be assessed. In the

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examples considered, a high degree of consistency in the evidence derived from the two types of source is apparent, giving some grounds for optimism in this respect. In considering how far evidence obtained from the 1840s sixty-inch scale OS maps can be used to shed new light on urban housing quality, the housing mentioned in the sanitary reports, as well as that omitted from them, can be studied. The insights obtained are by no means comprehensive, but they do enable highly useful evidence to be gleaned regarding the types of housing provided and their external facilities. As an example of the housing mentioned in sanitary reports, that centring on Moor Street and Cleaver Street, Blackburn, may be considered (figure 6.4).29 It is shown on Gillies’ map of Blackburn, which was surveyed in 1824, and probably would have been fairly newly built at that time.30 The key point to make about this housing is that, whilst it was mainly back-to-back, its quality nonetheless showed considerable variation, as, for example, with regard to yard provision. Thus, in quite a number of instances, it appears that a front and adjoining back house shared privy facilities in a private yard whilst, in other cases, yards were shared by four or more dwellings, with several households relying on one privy. Except in the case of the houses surrounding the highly confined Riley’s Court, yard space appears to have been on the generous side and was certainly far more spacious than in the case of Preston’s Queen Street back-to-backs. Noticeable, too, are the differing ways in which the removal of ash and excreta from the back yards was undertaken. In the easternmost block, lobbies were provided at intervals between the houses, giving access to each of the yards. Accordingly, waste material had to be transported to the front of the houses for removal. In the other block, however, waste products could be removed directly from the yards via Back Moor Street. Since this street was wide enough to accommodate a horse and cart, it not only avoided the unpleasantness and health risks of conveying excreta to the front of the houses, but, by reducing the carriage of waste-material receptacles by hand, also made the process of collection far more efficient.31

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Figure 6.4. Moor Street and Cleaver Street, Blackburn, 1847 Further evidence of variation in back-to-back houses can be discerned in relation to size. For the most part, the Moor Street and Cleaver Street houses were provided with cellars for handloom weaving. To allow natural light to enter them, the cellars projected above ground level, necessitating the construction of short flights of steps to the doors. In quite a number of cases, cellar wells were also provided.32 Photographic evidence shows that the houses in Cleaver Street that were serviced via Back Moor Street had two storeys above the cellars providing, therefore, only a living room and bedroom in addition to the workshop.33 However, in the easternmost block, four of the Cleaver Street back-to-backs were double-fronted, as were six others opposite them in Moor Street; the ground floor area they occupied was up to twice that of the other back-to backs and the steps to the doors were centrally placed. In effect, these dwellings offered as much internal living space (or nearly as much) as two-up, two-down through houses.34 Other points that can be derived from the large-scale maps are that the inhabitants of Moor Street and Cleaver Street benefited from a certain amount of street lighting and street drainage, considerations of some importance in judging housing quality. According to Withers, however, Blackburn’s street drains were “imperfect and inadequate for the

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purpose”.35 The houses were also situated in fairly wide and regular streets with pavements on either side, although these varied in width and the cellar wells and doorsteps posed potential hazards for the unwary. How some of the water they needed was obtained is revealed by mention of a pump in one of the yards off Back Moor Street, whilst surrounding industrial premises enable some assessment to be made of locational advantages and disadvantages that the inhabitants experienced.

Figure 6.5. Housing in the Nova Scotia area of Blackburn, 1847 But what of the housing not mentioned in contemporary reports? To demonstrate the insights that can be gained into its quality through largescale map investigation, examples from the Nova Scotia area, on the southern edge of Blackburn, may be considered (figure 6.5).36 The most notable difference between the houses here and those in the Cleaver Street and Moor Street areas of the town is the prevalence of through houses rather than back-to-backs. In that sense alone, appreciably higher accommodation standards are evident. Yet, once again, marked variation in quality can be discerned, especially in terms of sanitation provision. In Kay Street and Nova Scotia, the main

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road running through the settlement, shared yards and perhaps privies and ash pits, were to be found. In other streets, however, each house commonly had its own back yard with privy and, perhaps, ash pit. Even so, the yard space available was generally very limited and whilst back passages were provided, they did not offer the width, straightness or through access that was needed to cater for horse-drawn carts.37 As with the lobby system, therefore, considerable labour was required in carrying waste material from one position to another before it could be loaded onto carts for removal. The rows of houses bordering Kay Street and Nova Scotia comprised the oldest properties in the area. They are marked on Gillies’ map of 1824 and, again, were associated with handloom weaving.38 They less obviously contained cellar loomshops than the Cleaver Street and Moor Street cottages, although some doorsteps and cellar wells can be seen on the large-scale OS map. And perhaps some of the rear yard buildings were used as loomshops and warehouses. The other rows depict the type of improved workers’ dwellings that were being built in Blackburn during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, as canal-side sites were increasingly exploited for the construction of cotton spinning and weaving mills. Two-up, two-down units prevailed, probably with the downstairs front room functioning as a living room/kitchen.39 The closeness of the rows of houses was no doubt influenced by the limited space available, although the additional expense involved in providing back passages also entered into the account. Indeed, confined back yards occurred generally in the town where through houses were serviced by back passages. Being around a quarter or a third of the depth of the houses, such yards fell well short of the figure of around three-quarters that John Withers thought desirable.40 As in the Cleaver and Moor Street area, street lighting and drainage were provided, along with pavements. The use of large-scale maps to assess aspects of the quality of workingclass housing in the early Victorian period enables a very different picture to be obtained compared with that based on public health reports. In some instances, the map evidence can be used to provide additional detail about the quality of the housing mentioned in the reports, demonstrating the need to guard against easy generalisation, even with regard to back-tobacks. Equally importantly, map evidence can be used to make more comprehensive assessments of housing quality than is possible with the reports alone, especially concerning housing type and sanitation provision, and can do so with regard to change over time. Scrutiny of the maps helps to reveal how narrowly focused the reports can be, both in terms of the

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geographical areas with which they deal and the criteria on accommodation standards that they address. Advancing understanding of urban working-class housing quality in the early Victorian period and, indeed, how it changed thereafter, requires a more thorough analysis of the evidence that can be derived from a variety of sources, but especially from large-scale OS maps. In Lancashire and Yorkshire, those published on a scale of sixty inches to the mile during the 1840s and 1850s are extremely revealing, both because of the high standards of accuracy to which they were drawn and the amount of detail they record. They are particularly useful in providing a corrective to the overly-pessimistic view that is commonly expressed about the poor quality of working-class housing in the early Victorian period. And they do so not only by permitting more systematic analysis than is possible with contemporary reports, but also by demonstrating that, though the quality of some working-class housing was deplorable and may well have been deteriorating, housing of much improved quality was also being built. Additionally, they also help to confirm the observation made in 1849 by Angus Reach, a journalist employed by The Morning Chronicle, that housing quality could vary appreciable from one part of a town to another. Writing of Manchester, he remarked on the squalid housing in the older parts of the town, including Ancoats, “entirely an operative colony”, contrasting it with the “cheering spectacle” offered by the “humble but comfortable streets” that had been constructed in the new district of Hulme.41 Reflected in such observation is the growing prosperity that numerous working-class families experienced during the Industrial Revolution era, which was translated into a realisable demand for muchimproved accommodation standards, enabling far less reliance to be placed on back-to-back and cellar provision.

1

See, for example, John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815-1970 (London, 1980), ch.3 and R. Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain, 1780-1914 (Basingstoke, 1989), ch. 4. 2 Burnett, Housing, 55. 3 See, for example, the discussion in M.Daunton, Progress and Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 439-41. 4 Brief details of the national public health reports can be found in E. Midwinter, Social Administration in Lancashire, 1830-1860 (Manchester), 79-86. 5 For an Australian case study of how the broader interpretation of a perceived slum area can be constructed using a varied range of source material, see Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence, “Ethnographies of Place: A New Urban Research Agenda”, Urban History, 26, (1999), 325-348.

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For comment on the deterioration issue, see Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 1842, ed. M.W. Flinn (Edinburgh, 1964), 4-6. 7 For discussion of large-scale town maps, see Brian Paul Hindle, Maps for Local History (London, 1988), chapters 4 and 6. 8 Much of this photographic evidence can be viewed on line. See for example, the local image catalogues for Manchester at http://www.images.manchester.gov.uk; Liverpool at http://www.mersey-gateway.org; and Lancashire at http://lanternimages.lancashire.gov.uk. 9 Six-inch to the mile OS maps are also available from the 1840s and can give useful detail on such features as street width and back passage provision. 10 Yorkshire is the only other county for which such comprehensive coverage of sixty-inch to the mile OS maps is available. For further details see J.B. Harley, The Historian’s Guide to Ordnance Survey Maps (1964), 27-9. 11 J. Withers, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Blackburn (Blackburn, 1853). 12 G.C. Miller, Blackburn: The Evolution of a Cotton Town (Blackburn, 1951), 421-37. 13 Withers, Sanitary Condition, 12. 14 For discussion of the conservancy and water-carried systems, see H. Phillips Fletcher, Architectural Hygiene (London, 1927), 98-101. 15 Withers, Sanitary Condition, 28 & 38-9. 16 Withers, Sanitary Condition, 65. 17 Rev. Walter Lowe Clay, The Prison Chaplain: A Memoir of the Rev. John Clay, B.D. (Cambridge, 1861), 492. 18 John Clay, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Preston (Preston, 1842), 180. 19 Ordnance Survey, sixty inch to the mile map of Preston, sheet 17 (1849). 20 Lobbies characterised Preston’s working-class housing until the late nineteenth century, when back passages were introduced. For details, see Nigel Morgan, Deadly Dwellings (Preston, 1993), 59-72. 21 James Phillips Kay, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes (Manchester: Morten 1969 reprint of 1832 edition), 34-5. 22 Kay, Moral and Physical Condition, 12. 23 Kay, Moral and Physical Condition, 64. 24 Lack of privacy in relation to sleeping accommodation brought particular concern. See, for example, Chadwick, Sanitary Condition, 190-4. 25 Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester & Salford (1831). 26 Ordnance Survey, sixty-inch to the mile map of Manchester, sheet 33 (Godfrey reprint of 1851 edition). 27 The railway was opened in 1849. See R. Scola, Feeding the Victorian City (Manchester, 1992), 110. 28 For discussion, see John R. Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities (London, 1969), 324-36.

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Ordnance Survey, sixty-inch to the mile map of Blackburn, sheet 5 (1848). Illustrations, History, Directory, and Gazetteer of the County Palatine of Lancaster (Manchester: Morten 1969 reprint of 1824/5 edition). 31 For details of superior back-to-backs built in Bradford from the mid-1860s, see George Sheeran, “Back-to-back Houses in Bradford”, The Bradford Antiquar, 2, (1986), 47-53. 32 The cellar wells are shown by long, thin oblongs adjoining the front step or steps. 33 See G.Timmins, Blackburn, A Pictorial History (Chichester, 1993), illustration 10. The original of the illustration is held in Blackburn Reference Library. 34 Double-fronted back-to-backs were commonly built in east Lancashire and adjoining parts of Yorkshire during the Victorian period. For further comment see G. Timmins, “Healthy and Decent Dwellings: The Evolution of the Two-up, Twodown House in Nineteenth-century Lancashire” in A. Crosby ed., Lancashire Local Studies (Preston, 1993), 106-7. 35 Withers, Sanitary Condition, 8. 36 Ordnance Survey, sixty inch to the mile map of Blackburn, sheet 13 (1848). 37 Withers recommended that back passages should be at least ten feet wide (Withers, Sanitary Condition, 18). 38 Some handloom weavers were still recorded in the area by the 1851 census enumerators. See 1851 Census Schedules, Blackburn, enumeration district 1qq. 39 For discussion of this type of house, see Timmins, “Healthy and Decent”, 103113. 40 Withers, Sanitary Condition, 19. 41 C. Aspin ed., Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Helmshore, 1972), 3. 30

CHAPTER SEVEN REVISITING THE SLUMS IN MANCHESTER AND SALFORD IN THE 1930S BILL LUCKIN

Introduction In one or another form, slums are always with us, yet the discursive formation, identity and dominant representation of such places is permanently and controversially in flux. This contribution focuses on a period of deep economic, social and cultural crisis in the urban north-west when the certitudes of high, pioneering industrialism had been shattered and civic self-confidence in once pulsating cities like Manchester and Salford was significantly undermined. The chapter seeks to define a specific moment of transition when urban, social and housing reformers belatedly began to break with stock vocabularies and images associated with Victorian and Edwardian slums and slum-dwellers. Identifying a turn towards social scientific, quantitative and material specificity, the essay contends that inter-war observers in Manchester and Salford hesitantly developed means of cataloguing and interpreting the minutiae of everyday social, economic and cultural survival in deeply deprived areas. The central claim is that voluminous oral evidence collected during these years contributed to the emergence of images of slum-dwellers as individuals, albeit culturally and socially deeply inferior individuals, rather than quasi-theatrical inventions or moralized types. To the considerable surprise of slum investigators, the very poorest inhabitants of Manchester and Salford were now revealed as rational individuals, possessing understanding of the environments in which they lived, appreciation of the delicately balanced pros and cons of the advantages and disadvantages of attempting to move to new municipal estates and intimate knowledge of the ways in which slums blighted the hopes of sons and daughters. However, there was no sudden or absolute discursive break. Close reading of the predominantly middle-class reformist reportage considered here

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indicates that Victorian and Edwardian moralism died a slow death. Thus newly-minted social scientific ways of seeing and categorizing, legitimated by novel professional, progressive and technical values, gradually began to modify heavily loaded and, at times exceptionally negative, perceptions of those born and nurtured in urban Britain’s classic slums. In this sense, the period did not witness the emergence of a radically new or “objective” sociological methodology for exploring what it felt like to live in one of the “hidden” interwar streets or alleys of Hulme, Ancoats or Red Bank.

Victorian and Edwardian legacies In 1928 B.S.Townroe, a self-appointed slum expert, argued that the poorest and most environmentally deprived areas in inter-war Britain’s great cities, were invariably located: off a main street … where through-traffic has been made impossible by the intervention of canals, railway embankments [and loss of] determination [on the part] of the original inhabitants or owners to regard their person or their land as something select and inviolable.1

Developing this vision, another commentator, Harry Barnes, expanded on the definition propounded a couple of decades earlier, by George Duckworth, co-worker on Charles Booth’s great metropolitan project and close observer of early twentieth-century working-class life in Hackney. Duckworth depicted the slum as a “street, closed court or alley tenanted by a casual, thoughtless and rough class of inhabitant not necessarily vicious but apt to contain bad characters”.2 In an authoritative article in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, in 1934, Bernard J.Newman took Barnes’s moralizing approach a step further, emphasizing the centrality of the “worst structural and sanitary conditions and the most degraded occupancy, usually by the lowest income groups”. Such locations, Newman went on, attracted “weaklings” and “disease carriers”, individuals who, through an infection-like process of inter-generational transmission, increased “the load of subnormal persons”. In time a “high concentration of defectives” within the slum would create additional “hazards” for “normal families” and “raise rates of morbidity, mortality and delinquency”. At an extreme, degeneracy would flourish within a milieu characterized by “sickness, mental abnormalities, shiftlessness and poverty”. Unless this sub-standard environment were radically reformed or eradicated Britain’s great cities would experience a dangerous weakening of the national stock. To Newman and many others,

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the abolition of the slum must inform eugenically-inspired, biological revival, a cause championed by both progressive and conservative academics, planners and policy-makers.3 Similar views dominated the writings of those who “ventured down” into the poorest districts of Manchester and Salford during the inter-war period. Visiting Manchester in the mid-1930s, H.V. Morton, popular chronicler of all things English, revelled in medico-pathological metaphor. Slums, he wrote, “persist with the tenacity of a disease” and “carry a wretched cargo of human life”. Morton framed his observations within tableau-like settings that had much in common with stock scenes derived from Victorian melodrama. Rooms contained a “chair or two, always broken, a table, a line of washing and the peculiar musty smell of a brick box in which generations had been born … lived and died for a hundred years”. At an absurdly over-stated extreme, such places were “more hellish” than Dante’s Inferno.4 Inhabitants of Ancoats and Beswick constituted a breed apart, with heredity producing an anthropologically alien culture that ensured the mindless reproduction of poverty and ignorance. Like many a middle-class investigator who plunged altruistically down into the poorest areas of Manchester and Salford, Morton showed little interest in day-to-day routines and strategies that ensured economic and psychological survival. A generation later, Robert Roberts confronted precisely these issues in his inspired accounts of the folkways of the Edwardian classic slum.5 There had been no shortage of evidence of this kind during the 1920s and 1930s and, had it been more fully exploited, progressives might have devoted as much attention to autonomy and agency as to victimization, deracination and despair. Levels of mortality, morbidity and welfare, were of course greatly inferior in places like Ancoats than in affluent southern suburbs, such as Didsbury or Withington.6 But, given this in-built epidemiological deficit, the great majority of slum-dwellers continued to struggle assiduously against dirt and overcrowding, patched up appallingly inadequate accommodation and worked wonders with outmoded sanitary and washing facilities. Protecting toddlers and children against an intensely risk-ridden external environment, they confronted complex family and economic problems, budgeted and planned for the future and weighed up the relative advantages of staying or leaving. In short, slum-dwellers appeared to possess a very nearly, genetically transmitted ability to make the most of a meagre economic and environmental legacy. Defying eugenic forebodings of race suicide, they survived; a minority prospered. Stigma and victimization loomed large; what else accounts for the ubiquity of the vile

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term “slummer”? All this, however, remained secondary to the unending struggle for self-respect. Willing to point a moralizing finger at shirkers and scroungers, particularly those who tried to breach unwritten rules governing the granting of credit in his mother’s corner-shop, Roberts nevertheless acknowledged that the great majority of those who lived in his Edwardian Salfordian neighbourhood placed a high premium on maintaining basic domestic standards. Townroe and Morton’s ghoulishly melodramatic stereotypes epitomized a deeply flawed reconstruction of the sordidness and abject desperation of the inter-war slum. Such images displayed an inability to recreate convincingly what had been observed, as well as a powerfully repressed sense of shame, guilt and fear. When they “came back up” from the counter-world of the “hidden” areas, observers often expressed confusion, disbelief and despair. As a distraught Salfordian investigator stated in 1930, “very few people can visualize in concrete detail and in terms of human life and bricks and mortar the real meaning of the … problem”.7 History and the traditions and myths generated by a simplified narrative of the development of urban life during the peak period of urban-industrialism provided a kind of reference-point. Damp and crumbling housing, in backward areas, constituted an “evil legacy of the past” with the “slum belt”, itself representing an “inadvertent monument to the Industrial Revolution” – “spectacular material” for De Quincey, Engels, Mrs Gaskell and Dickens.8 Throughout the “unplanned” generations between the 1780s and the 1880s houses, mills, workhouses and factories had “grown up together”, randomly, to create a chaotic cityscape, which nevertheless remained “unforgettably Manchester”. (In the latter decade, Manchester had nevertheless initiated systematic refurbishment of a massive stock of backto-backs.9) In late 1930s Ancoats “the ghost of Engels” still prowled “with [a] notebook through the … meanest of streets collecting explosive facts and figures for his great work on the Condition of the Working Class in England”.10 Conscious of the adamantine impact of environment and architecture, reformers insisted that slums constituted a scar on cities struggling to emerge from the trauma of irrational urbanization. At the same time, they luxuriated in the elaboration and recirculation of folk myths derived from an era of uncontested, although environmentally squalid, industrial world primacy. How difficult it was to combine commitment to planning and zoning with pride in belonging to neighbouring, but distinctive and mutually antagonistic cities that had quite literally “changed the world”!

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Nearly a century after the publication of The Condition of the English Working Class, ever-increasing numbers of respectable working-class families were moving from the urban core into faded terraces that had been vacated by petite bourgeois residents, seeking the improved amenities – two or three bedrooms, gas, electricity, plenty of hot water, a decent garden – associated with newly constructed suburban homes.11 Slum-dwellers, meanwhile, were depicted as a forgotten race, living in apartheid-like exile in spatially isolated sub-districts. Largely forgotten by municipal policy-makers, the inhabitants of these places were said to eke out a desperate existence in courts, alleys and dead-ends framed and constrained by semi-derelict factories and criss-crossing increasingly dangerous, traffic-dominated through-roads – the last of these comprising an ever-present threat to the safety of children and toddlers. Sunlight, gardens, trees and greenery were unknown. Housing reformers found it exceptionally difficult to capture the quintessence of the slum as anything other than a topsy-turvy counterworld, in which the values of bourgeois social life were routinely and, so it was frequently claimed, deliberately flouted.12 Nowhere was this more starkly revealed than in relationships between nature, morality and intimate domestic life – and how the sexual theme recurred! A minority of interviewees claimed that a “small garden”, in which children could play in safety would greatly improve the quality of family life.13 However, a majority displayed indifference to the fact that the environments in which they lived deprived them of all contact with the natural world. “We who are more fortunately placed”, lamented an investigator exploring a dense cluster of streets and alleys situated beneath London Road (now Piccadilly) Station in 1931, “impatiently pluck the weeds from our gardens: here even a weed would be welcome to ease the feet and gladden the eye”.14 Had there been access to greenery, reformers argued, slumdwellers might have been minimally compensated for “damp, dismal and dilapidated” housing.15 Availability of gardens and play-areas might have reduced pressure on single “family” rooms in which “the decencies of life and a pure level of domestic relationship could no longer be maintained”.16 Observers conceded that inhabitants of Ancoats, Hulme or St Matthias were no less decent or self-respecting than anyone else in Manchester or Salford and thus no more likely to engage in forbidden activities.17 Nevertheless, to the middle-class mind economic depression, casual and/or intermittent employment, environmental degradation and what were perceived as ever-deteriorating levels of overcrowding, presaged nothing less than moral collapse. Here, in particular, inter-war progressive, urban discourse revealed itself to be heavily influenced by Victorian and

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Edwardian preoccupations with housing density, premature knowledge of sexual intimacy and, at an extreme, incest between brothers and sisters, parents and children. These surveys identified domestic environments in which “married couples must either live out a parody of marriage or risk for themselves and their families possibilities too terrible to contemplate”.18 To the threat of incest must be added the drink problem with an observer in St Matthias, Salford concluding that the “lure of the public house” remained as powerful as ever.19 Reformist discourse tended to be rooted in the belief that intemperance and sexual ill discipline fuelled one another and were individually predetermined by ignorance, overcrowding and absence of creative leisure activities. In that sense, linear connections between the environmental and moral spheres proved as magnetically persuasive in inter-war Manchester and Salford as during the classic era of sanitary reform. According to this schema, place and space determined human behaviour. Children were the worst affected.20 Subjected to intense levels of overcrowding, young people would fall prey to “depression, impaired physique, listlessness …. Growing girls … [in particular would display] a tendency to seek comfort in unhealthy excitement”.21 In Chorlton-cum-Medlock “all ages and both sexes were huddled together within one stifling room”. As a result, “decency” proved “difficult”, “delicacy impossible”.22 “Premature acquaintance with conjugal relations [was] all but unavoidable” and “sexual malpractices [were] not unknown between members of the same household”.23 Little wonder that Ernest Simon, ex-mayor of Manchester, leading Liberal politician, co-founder of the garden-city-style suburb of Wythenshawe and internationally acknowledged expert on the inter-war housing crisis, remained revealingly convinced that slums were “full of squalor and shameful, hidden parts”.24 Influenced by theories developed by Cyril Burt in The Young Delinquent (1926), investigators also claimed that children and adolescents would be seriously harmed if repeatedly forced to overhear too many emotionally charged adult arguments in stifling, overcrowded, single “family” rooms.25 Psychological damage might be even more serious, in homes in which: the general disposition of the family [was] emotional – where anger, worry and sexual instincts [were] always near to the surface.26

This problem would be compounded by absence of leisure pursuits. Lack of living space or sublimating participation in outdoor activities forced children to “grow up too young” and shaped the minds of adolescents who displayed “contempt for … by-laws” and revealed an over-precocious

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interest in “gambling, flirting, exploring forbidden premises and joining together in hooliganism”.27 Thus, environmental progressives explicitly reduced the “problem of the slum” to a sexual-cum-disciplinary threat. As in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so also in inter-war Manchester and Salford, class-inflected and at times heavily religiously nuanced moralism, underpinned ubiquitous social cost-accounting. If the slums were radically restructured or eradicated, neighbouring districts might be protected against “spill-over” of intemperance, sexual profligacy, criminality and “fecklessness”.28 If the housing crisis were confronted head-on hospitals, charities, criminal justice and Public Assistance systems, might find it possible to make less pressing demands on private, public and municipal purses.29 Slums were expensive and bad for trade and rates. In the worst of all possible scenarios, disease, immorality and communal instability, originating in deprived and spatially isolated – at an extreme, “unknown” – districts, would spill out into the urban mainstream. Modernizing projects, designed to create a rational post-industrial economy and society, would be derailed.

Moralism modified Over-heated moralism played a central role in shaping middle-class perceptions of the slum in inter-war Manchester and Salford. New approaches, however, began slowly to modify long established representations and enabled contemporaries to gain a firmer grasp of strategies that sustained day-to-day existence in the poorest parts of both cities. Sponsored by Housing and Health Departments and voluntary, religious, party political and academic organisations, investigators documented the minutiae of life in the slum. To speak in terms of the authentic voice or voices of deprived areas may be to overstate the reliability and representativeness of material of this kind. Certainly, methodologically, researchers need to distinguish between grass-root attitudes derived from aggregated house-to-house surveys, extensive verbatim quotes, testimony subjected to editing and abbreviation and post hoc paraphrase of interviews recorded in investigators’ notebooks.30 However, by the later thirties, what inhabitants of Ancoats, Beswick or Angel Meadow actually said to interviewers began to exert an impact on perceptions of the individual and communal identities of those born, bred and socialized in a slum. During the 1920s and early 1930s, investigators had implicitly, but not yet explicitly, acknowledged that inhabitants of such districts were no more likely than their bourgeois or respectable working-class counterparts to become drunkards, criminals or sexual

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deviants. Thereafter, however, changing governmental and municipal policies towards housing, health and welfare played a role in modifying class-dominated perceptions of status, poverty and difference. This partial discursive break was underwritten by the reports of social scientific investigators who made a genuine attempt to separate the moral from the economic sphere. As a consequence, unreconstructed slum areas gradually came to be accepted as unique communities with histories, traditions and cultures of their own. Indeed, policy-makers praised the spirit of deprived districts and looked for ways of injecting the warmth of long-established working-class areas into what were now acknowledged to be unwelcoming and amenity-deprived municipal overspill estates.31 Textual analysis reveals a gradual shift towards visually and physically specific delineations of the slum. Increasing numbers of investigators focused on environment as environment, rather than as symbol and metaphor for sexual deviance, drunkenness and criminality.32 Readers were presented with precise spatial and topographic detail of street, court, alley and dead-end. In adopting an approach of this kind, reformers risked replacing one orthodoxy with another. Indeed, the newer style of survey was marked by over-extensive description of the evils of the random and irrational construction of the nineteenth-century urban core; absence, or near-absence, of light in houses and single-family rooms constructed in the shadow of mills, workshops and factories, the proximity of working-class accommodation to wasteland and part-demolished streets and atmospheric and noise pollution.33 In terms of economic variables, particularly rent, reformers engaged with the municipal scandal of “farmed” housing in faded terrace districts. Ernest Simon took the lead immediately after the First World War and confirmed that, even in an affluent southern suburb such as Didsbury, which boasted the lowest infant death-rate in Manchester, entire streets were filled with houses in which single rooms were occupied by families of between two to seven members.34 Applying the stringent “Manchester test”, Simon and others demonstrated that overcrowding guidelines, based on data collected by the Registrar-General’s Office, minimized the national scale of the problem.35 This voluminous literature pointed to the laxity of the law in relation to multiple sub-letting and directed attention to the exorbitant profits earned by landlords who had ceased to take meaningful responsibility for the properties they owned.36 In the modern slum the influence of agents, rent-collectors, sub-tenants and landladies loomed large.37 Meanwhile, investigators explored the complexities of the delicately-balanced equation that helped families to make decisions about whether to stay or move. Rents in the poorest areas of inter-war

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Manchester and Salford varied according to location and quality of accommodation. Single rooms in a rock-bottom municipal tenement block built at the end of the nineteenth century might come to no more than four shillings a week; overcrowded, slum “family” accommodation, nearly twice that amount and estate or superior privately-owned two-bedroom houses, between 10 and 12 shillings. A single “farmed” room in a oncerespectable terrace, might cost as much as an exorbitant 11 shillings a week.38 Accommodation of this latter kind invariably lacked the barely adequate cooking, washing and sanitary arrangements to be found in refurbished slum two-up, two-downs. Social scientific and economically oriented reformist writings refined methods of weighing income against outgoings, in an economy in which unskilled and casual work, or medium and/or long-term unemployment, continued to predominate. Quantifying the impact of relocation on Public Assistance benefits, observers calculated the additional proportion of family earnings that might have to be spent on public transport. Conclusions were clear-cut and substantiated by oral evidence. Throughout the inter-war period, Manchester recorded a deficit of a minimum of ten thousand houses for non-middle-class inhabitants. As a result, waiting-lists were distressingly long. In addition, only a fraction of those who lived in the hidden areas were able to manage the additional rent demanded for a superior house on a municipal estate. As Ernest Simon noted, in 1930, “if a man is earning £2 to £3, out of which he has to keep a young family and is now paying 8s for a slum dwelling near his work, it is useless to offer him a suburban house at 11s to 18s”.39 For the great majority of slum-dwellers, a substantial subsidy would have been needed to cover additional transport costs. The development of the green suburb of Wythenshawe had been predicated on the assumption that light engineering capital would be attracted into the periphery of the main residential area, thereby obviating the need for workers to make a daily journey into the inner city. This proved over-optimistic. Both slum and ex-slum estate-dwellers continued to be heavily reliant on the casual labour market and long established networks of information about jobs in the immediate vicinity of the urban core. In addition, municipal housing officers were entrusted with the task of ensuring that those who moved from the poorest parts of the two cities would be in a position to keep up rent payments, secure suitable furniture, put enough money aside for gas and electricity and demonstrate strong moral fibre.40 The worst-off members of the community could be forgiven for believing that municipal policy in both cities rested on the assumption that stable working-class

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families deserved to live on estates and that slum-dwellers must continue to languish in slums. A wide spectrum of oral testimony suggests that however much individual families may have wanted to escape from the most environmentally degraded areas of Manchester and Salford, the economics of rent invariably militated against such a course of action. Thirty five to forty per cent of inhabitants from sampled deprived localities during the 1920s and 1930s would have opted to move to an estate but could only have done so had they been guaranteed extra Public Assistance payments to cope with additional immediate and long-term costs.41 Nearly everyone agreed that, “children should leave”, but this could only happen if help were extended to whole families. In the case of single, elderly, slumdwellers, who were no longer able to work and who frequently lived in the most appalling conditions of all, oral evidence suggests that a majority had enough to get by, felt physically secure and would have preferred to migrate to Mars than to a “snobbish” semi-suburban estate.42 By the end of the period, increasing numbers of investigators were beginning to acknowledge that forgotten and environmentally degraded courts, alleys and dead-ends did indeed possess a sense of communal cohesion.43 This was related to a growing and disturbing realization that the grand experiment of the municipal estate was beginning to generate massive social problems of its own. Other progressives found a kind of mindless solace in quasi-mystical visions of a future in which “the inner ring of slums [would develop into] a well ordered district of dignity, greenness and beauty”.44 Ancoats would be provided with “open space … ample provision for indoor recreation and for those things which minister to a full life”.45 All too often, guilt-ridden, wish-fulfilment continued to supress rigorous analysis of ways and means.

Conclusion By the late 1930s in Manchester and Salford Victorian and Edwardian attitudes towards the slum had finally entered decline. A widening range of spatial, social scientific and economic perspectives now framed and partially redefined a, seemingly intractable, social and environmental problem. However, this more analytic approach carried within itself values that implied commitment to new ways of reshaping the lives and collective mentalities of slum-dwellers. In the near future, town planners would attempt and in the longer term fail to fashion and operate new variants of architecturally deterministic post-Victorian moral control.46 Each era generates its own distinctive form of environmental engineering and seeks

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to project socially constructed styles of acceptable behaviour on to the poorest members of urban communities. In attempting to devise universal behavioural codes, however, reformers and policy-makers rarely devote sufficient attention to those who, in Foucauldian terms, are to be “reformed” as responsible citizens. In this sense, there has been a recurring failure to engage with the minutiae of the day-to-day grind of survival on the part of those who have no option but to live on desperately inadequate incomes in the most environmentally-degraded areas. In addition, urban policy-makers tend unthinkingly to play to and are unduly influenced by the media and public opinion which is significantly shaped by representations incessantly reproduced by the media. As a consequence, meaningful debate degenerates into moral panic and over-arching, classinflected solutions replace gradual approaches to the task of civilizing the city. So the slums remain. As in inter-war Salford and Manchester, the balance between rampant moralism and workable programmes of reform, remains central to an understanding of the archaeology of an abiding phenomenon and successive waves of central, regional and local reform.47

1

B. S. Townroe, The Slum Problem (London, 1928), 11. H. Barnes, The Slum: Its Story and Solution (London, 1931), 7. 3 Bernard J. Newman, “Slums” in E.R.A. Seligman ed., Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (London, 1934), 95-96. See also E.E. Hayward, “Slum Environment and the Public Health”, National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, Report, ii, (London, 1912), 125-55: W. Bolitho, Cancer of Empire (London, 1924): and C. R. A. Martin, Slums and Slummers: A Sociological Treatise on the Housing Problem (London, 1935). See, also, Patricia Garside, “‘Unhealthy Areas’: Town Planning, Eugenics and the Slums”, Planning Perspectives 3 (1988): 24-46. For valuable interpretation of an earlier era see Seth Kovan, Slumming and Social and Sexual Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004). 4 H. V. Morton, What I Saw in the Slums (London, 1933 or 1934) 5 and 34-6. 5 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Manchester, 1971) and idem, A Ragged Schooling: Growing Up in the Classic Slum (Manchester, 1977). For additional regional context see Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working Class Culture in Salford and Manchester 1900-1939 (Buckingham, 1992) and Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding eds, Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford 1880-1939 (Manchester, 1992). 6 Report on the Health of the City of Manchester 1930, 7: Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3: Housing Needs of Ancoats in 2

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Relation to the Greenwood Act (Manchester, 1930), 8: and “Survey of 1,076 Homes in Hulme” in How Manchester Is Managed (Manchester, 1939), 8. 7 Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Report on Housing Conditions of a Salford Area (Manchester, 1930), 12. See, also, Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Angel Meadow and Red Bank (Manchester, 1931), 11. 8 E. D. Simon, “Headings for Warburton Lecture”, 5. Simon Papers. Manchester Central Reference Library. M11/16/15. February 28, 1934 and Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Under the Arches (Behind London Road Station) (Manchester, 1931), 3. 9 Simon, “Warburton Lecture”. 10 Manchester University Settlement, Ancoats: A Study of a Clearance Area: Report of a Survey in 1937-38 (Manchester, 1945), 7. See also Manchester and District Survey Society, Some Housing Conditions in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester (Manchester, 1931), 5-6. 11 See Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 1-7 and E. D. Simon, The Anti-Slum Campaign (London, 1933), 87-90. 12 The key studies here are Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities 1870-1914 (Leicester, 1993) and A. Mayne and T.Murray eds., The Archaeology of the Urban Landscape: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge, 2001). But see also Alan Mayne, “A Barefoot Childhood. So What ?” and David Englander, “Urban History or Urban Historicism? A Response to Alan Mayne”, Urban History 22 (1995), 380-91; B.M. Doyle, “Mapping Slums in a Historic City: Representing Working-Class Communities in Edwardian Norwich”, Planning Perspectives, 16 (2001), 47-65; and John Welshman, “Eugenics and Public Health in Britain, 1900-40: Scenes from Provincial Life”, Urban History, 24 (1997), 58-75 and particularly 68-72. For additional historiographical context see H.J. Dyos and D.A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs” in H.J. Dyos and Michael Woolf eds., The Victorian City: Images and Realities: Volume 1 (London, 1973), 359-86; A.S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (1977); S.M. Gaskell ed., Slums (Leicester, 1990); J.A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London, 1986); and idem, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England 1918-1945 (London, 1992). 13 See Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Social Aspect of Pre-War Tenements and of Post-War Flats (Manchester, 1932), 9 and 11. 14 Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Under the Arches , 5. 15 ibid, 7. 16 ibid. 17 ibid. 18 ibid, 10. 19 Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Housing Conditions in the St Matthias’ Ward, Salford (Manchester, 1931), i.

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Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Social Aspects of Pre-War Tenements, 9 and Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Angel Meadow and Red Bank, 10 and 13. 21 Manchester University Settlement, A Study of the Health of Ancoats and Some Suggestions for its Improvement (Manchester, 1923), 12. 22 Manchester and District Survey Society, Housing Conditions in Chorlton-onMedlock, 9. 23 ibid. 24 E. D. Simon, The Rebuilding of Britain: A Twenty Year Plan (London, 1942), 10. Simon was a prolific contributor to the national and north-western slum debate throughout the interwar period. See in particular E. D. Simon, How to Abolish the Slums (London, 1929) and idem, The Anti-Slum Campaign (London, 1933) and Wythenshawe (1935). Simon also collaborated with J. Inman on The Rebuilding of Manchester (London, 1935). For incisive biographical detail see A. Olechnowicz, “Civic Leadership and Education for Democracy: the Simons and the Wythenshawe Estate”, Contemporary British History, 14 (2000), 3-26. 25 Manchester and District Survey Society, Housing Conditions in Chorlton-cumMedlock, 9-10. 26 ibid, 14. 27 ibid. 28 Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 19. 29 The case is powerfully made in Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 19 and Manchester University Settlement, Study of the Health of Ancoats. 30 The locus classicus on these issues remains Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, 2000, third edition). 31 The standard work on this theme is A. Olechnowicz, Working Class Housing in England Between the Wars: The Becontree Estate (Oxford, 1997). 32 These depictions should be compared with the material in Kovan, Slumming. 33 For excellent examples of this style of analysis, see Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Survey of Housing Conditions of a Salford Area, 5: Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Angel Meadow and Red Bank, 56: and Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 8. A revealing “tour” of a slum domestic interior can be found in Manchester University Settlement, Housing Conditions in Ancoats (Manchester, 1928), 9. 34 E. D. Simon, “Overcrowding in Didsbury and Ancoats Compared”. 21 November, 1919. E. D. Simon Papers. M11/16/15. 35 On the mechanics of the “Manchester test” see Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 13. 36 Subletting lay at the heart of the problem. See Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Angel Meadow and Red Bank, 8 and J.Shimwell, Some Manchester Homes (Manchester, 1929).

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Slum landladies were much-feared figures. See Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Angel Meadow and Red Bank, 12 and H.P. Marshall and A. Trevelyan, Slum (London, 1933), 51-2. 38 E. D. Simon and Eleanor F. Rathbone, “Clearing the Slums”, The Times, 18 January, 1930; E.D. Simon, “Government’s Housing Policy”, Manchester Guardian, 9 January, 1933. 39 Simon and Rathbone, “Clearing the Slums”. 40 Townroe, Slum Problem, 73-4 and Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 18. 41 Key contributions included J. Inman, “Poverty and Housing Conditions in a Manchester Ward”, University of Manchester Economics Research Section, No. 2 (Manchester, 1934) and J.R. Jarman, “Rent Rebates and Rehousing in Manchester”, Manchester School, ix (1938), 46-66. For an excellent account of reasons for not leaving the slums see Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Report on Survey of Housing Conditions in a Salford Area, 11-12. 42 The best account of the day-to-day life of the elderly in the Manchester and Salford slums is to be found in Manchester and District Regional Survey, Some Social Aspects of Pre-War Tenements. 43 See Manchester and Salford Better Housing Council, Housing in Hulme: A Report by the Hulme Housing Association (Manchester, 1932), 2. 44 Manchester University Settlement, Social Studies of a Manchester Ward 3, 26. 45 Manchester University Settlement, Ancoats, A Study of a Clearance Area, 50. 46 David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998). 47 On these issues, see Alison Ravetz, Remaking Cities: Constructions of the Recent Urban Environment (London, 1980) and Nigel Taylor, Urban Planning Theory since 1945 (London, 1998).

CHAPTER EIGHT “THE GIRLS HAVE GONE TO WEAVE BY STEAM”: REPRESENTING THE FEMALE CROWD IN THE TEXTILE TOWNS OF THE CENTRAL PENNINES GEORGE SHEERAN

Introduction In this chapter, it is argued that the growth of towns in nineteenthcentury northern England, especially the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, did not simply change the scale of things but brought about different orders of urban space. It is in this context that it will address issues of gender, specifically women’s roles and suggest that a certain gendering of space took place that was not readily found in many towns in other parts of nineteenth century England, and as such it was a regional development. The region – if that term can be used – in which this discussion will be located, is the Central Pennines, the area of the Pennines bounded, approximately, by Skipton and Clitheroe to the north and Ashton-underLyme and Holmfirth to the south. The discussion will not be totally inflexible about geographical boundaries, however, as there are also economic ones. The area should be extended, therefore, to include one or two Lancashire and Yorkshire textile towns, for instance Leeds to the east or as far west as Wigan. In other words, the area being defined is the area of nineteenth-century textile production that fringed the Central Pennines on both sides and spread out to the east and west. The aims of this chapter are to comment on the employment open to women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its changing nature; examine a new gendering of urban space brought about by the transition to factory production; consider some contemporary reactions to this and try to deconstruct some key texts concerned with it. It shall conclude by

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arguing that the factory and the industrial town altered patterns of urban life, not only in terms of employment but also in the new spatial organisations they imposed on employment.

Women, Employment and Urban Space before 1800 The role of women in relation to work and the effects of industrialisation, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been the subject of many studies and this section will not do much more than mention some of these. Perhaps the pioneering study is Ivy Pinchbeck’s, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, a book published in 1930, yet, which remains a classic study1 and not inferior to more recent work from contemporary historians, such as Catherine Hall, Elizabeth Roberts or Jane Rendall.2 While all have produced illuminating analyses of the position of women in the nineteenth century, there has been little comment on how the new spatial organisations of urban and factory life affected women. Before examining this topic, however, the chapter will consider what the principal types and places of work were for women before the nineteenth century. The home had primacy of place and remained the proper place for a woman, becoming, in some ways, more rigid in the nineteenth century.3 Domestic service had also been an important female occupation and became more so during the nineteenth century, but there were also craft industries in which women played an essential part. While there were numerous urban commercial, and craft industries, from selling toffee, to making silver spoons, a most important and large category of women’s employment was the millinery and dressmaking trades. Important, also, for this chapter, was the domestic production of textiles, which was not restricted to spinning or carding, as there were also some women weavers. Agriculture was not, of course, an urban occupation but should, nevertheless, be taken into account as a major occupational category. It was also a more varied occupation than, at first, meets the eye; not just dairymaids, but labourers, women farmers, farmers’ wives on large or small farms, and so on. Before the nineteenth century, all these occupations were carried out in the home or in small workshops and, although a rigid model of family production has been criticized by some historians as underestimating the numbers of people a family business might employ, nevertheless, the unit of production remained familial in nature, especially in the craft industries where it lingered until well into the nineteenth century. Agricultural activities, however, might be seen as somewhat different. Spatially, they

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were larger scale and were carried out in the open air or in large buildings, like barns. At certain times of year they employed a good deal of hired itinerant labour which included many women. At Malton, in the north of Yorkshire, for instance, there was a particularly important hiring fair with a large female section. Even here, however, we need to realise that activities, such as the harvest, were communal activities, as well as occasions when labour might be hired seasonally. Even then, people tended to work the fields in teams of three or four, very often two or three women were supervised by a male labourer. In other words we should, again, think in terms of family-sized productive units. What is also pertinent is the small farm where few people, other than the immediate family, worked the land, a situation typical of the upland Pennine farm. To come to the concluding point of this section, what this implies for the use of space, either in towns or in the countryside before about 1800, is that although people of both sexes might walk to work in the town, it was never in crowds, to the same place and many lived over the shop. Although larger groupings of people might come together in the countryside, when labourers or harvest gangs walked to the fields, this was only at certain specified times of the year and hired labour may well not be resident within a village for longer than the hiring. This was to change.

Nineteenth-Century Industrialisation What brought about the change was capitalist organisation of labour through the factory system and what was to add to it, in terms of spatial change, was population-growth and urbanisation. We are no doubt familiar with the growth in population during the nineteenth century and the effect that this had on towns, both through natural increases in urban populations and migrant workers. This is a well-considered historical debate,4 however, it is important to raise the point in the light of what follows, because it will be argued that while numbers of factories, especially textile factories, were situated in rural locations, the greatest congregations of factories were to be found in and around towns. The textile factories in the North of England, around 1780-1810, employed large numbers of women and children in spinning or carding mills. Although this was a situation that came under increasing legislation (the 1819 Factory Act prohibiting the employment of children under 9 in cotton mills; the 1833 Factory Act limiting the hours of employment of children and youths; the Ten Hours Act of 1847), large numbers of women

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continued to work in textile mills, typically between 40% and 60% of the workforce of a mill. This is a subject that has occupied historians from Pinchbeck in the 1930s to the present day. The classic questions posed have been; what was the effect of the Industrial Revolution on women’s employment? What was the effect on family life? How did this affect the occupational and social structures of society? More recently, however, the question has been turned round, so that we might also ask what the effect of this process of industrialisation was on women and the roles that they played; as workers, as wage earners, as consumers. This is, of course, a brief and crude summary but, keeping more recent debate in mind, it is more to permit a return to one of the classic arguments about the effect that factory work had on women and to make reference to what nineteenth-century commentators had to say. In this latter respect, contemporaries almost universally condemned women’s work in factories. One observation of the early nineteenth century comes from Gustave d’Eichthal, French intellectual and follower of August Comte, who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology. In his journal of a tour of Britain in 1828, d’Eichthal commented that in Bolton, mule spinners (men) usually seduced the women working alongside them and that such immorality was common in textile mills.5 Even in the ‘reformed’ mills of the Leeds entrepreneur, Benjamin Gott, where workers worked in family groups and immorality was punishable by dismissal, d’Eichthal was told by his Leeds hostess that, nevertheless, “when a girl has worked in the mills it is a very poor recommendation for her, if she wishes to take up domestic service”.6 When Angus Bethune Reach, a young Scot working for the Morning Chronicle, visited Lancashire and Yorkshire in his inquiry into the state of industrial towns in 1849, he recorded much the same comments being made. In the Saddleworth area (near Oldham and Huddersfield), he was also told that factory employment was no job for a married woman.7 These sorts of comments are typical: the factory was seen as a breeding ground for immorality amongst the young. This is also a sentiment that we find expressed in some folksong, notably the nineteenth century Yorkshire song, The Weaver and the Factory Maid. It opens with the verses: I am a hand-weaver to my trade, I fell in love with a factory maid, And if I could but her favour win, I’d stand beside her and weave by steam.

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Chapter Eight My father to me scornful said: ‘How could you fancy a factory maid When you could have girls fine and gay, And dressed like to the Queen of May?’8

Here, the son would throw over everything to be with the woman he loves but the father disapproves of these sentiments; the correct woman for the son to court is associated with nature and tradition, the “Queen of May”. The factory maid is immoral, a snare to decency, so she is contemptuously dismissed. There were further objections which intersected these, objections that arose from conceptions of woman as homemaker. Robert Baker, a factory inspector working in the Leeds area in 1839, put it like this; the mill girl: leaves her work and hastens to her associates, with whom during the day she has planned some project for the evening; her father is at the public house; her mother, thus left alone for months, has herself become careless in her person; the daughter thus has no one to guide her; her associates at home and abroad are abandoned, eventually she becomes so herself and is lost to all sense of decency.9

Interestingly, Baker sees this as an urban, rather than a rural problem. This was a moral dilemma in which many in industrialising nineteenthcentury England found themselves; factory employment was no employment for a decent woman, as work took place in an atmosphere of licentiousness, while taking her away from her natural habitat, the home. On the other hand, the textile mill could not function without the cheap labour that women supplied and nothing in the way of legislation preventing women from employment in factories, was passed through parliament. It appears to be the classic application of a double standard, except that many women would have retained the system, if not the low wages. Thus, when an article appeared in The Examiner of 29th January, 1832, putting forward the idea that women and children should be prevented from working in textile mills, it elicited a response in the 26th February edition purporting to come from the “Female Operatives of Todmorden”, protesting that employment in local textile factories was the only means by which many young women might support themselves, thus easing the burden on their families.10 There is nothing new in this line of argument, but it will be extended to suggest that a further issue for contemporary society respecting women’s employment in nineteenth-century urban factories, was not only the employment of women but also their presence in large numbers. Several accounts of contemporaries attest to this, but there is none so striking as

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the comments of Rev. J. H. Pollen, curate at St Saviour’s church in Leeds, in the 1840s. Pollen wrote a vivid account of his time there, which was published in 1851 and from which the following extract is taken: If it be noon, the factory bell will be sounding, and troops of women and girls defiling along the streets, clothed in long canvass aprons, their heads covered with a loose handkerchief - the neck and arms uncovered, and adorned with gaudy trinkets - coarse and immodest in voice, looks, and expression.11

Here is a new phenomenon; the female crowd. While people in the eighteenth century and before had known crowds, they were of a different character. Crowds occurred as a result of civil disorder or at such ritual occasions as folk celebrations, Sunday services, annual festivities, markets and so on.12 But what Pollen describes is rather different, for in the nineteenth-century industrial town this sort of thing was a regular daily occurrence, taking place, perhaps three times a day, mornings, lunchtimes and evenings. What is more, it placed women within public space; not the ordered public space of ritual, where each knew her role, nor was it the public space of the market, or shop, where roles were defined by the nature of the transactions that took place. This was a parade or assembly of women, as they walked to work or passed their lunch hour out-of-doors. Moreover, these were gatherings of women who appeared independent and answerable to none, even if their actions, ultimately, were circumscribed by men. It is telling the way that Pollen writes about crowds of women almost in terms of civil disobedience. This was far from the position, however, for what amazed other commentators was the orderly way that mill crowds, male or female, regularly made their way to and from work without disorder. Thus, in a letter to a Bradford newspaper, one correspondent describes the pouring forth of workers from Saltaire Mills, near Bradford, a mill that employed some 2,000 - 3,000 people when the letter was written in 1857: At first may be seen six or eight men and women walking leisurely up the yard, converging as they approach the stone steps. Then follow some ten or twelve boys, who race each other to the top; next a few “hands” step rapidly along, as if wishful to be out of the way. Gradually numbers increase, swelling rapidly, and filling the steps from side to side and from bottom to top. In a quarter of an hour thousands have passed before you; the clatter of clogs and the hum of voices has ceased; the streets look deserted.13

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Perhaps it was the female crowd, however, that drew the condemnation of and produced anxiety in contemporaries, especially crowds of young women (16-25 years old) with all the impudence and buoyancy that such crowds might display. It was a strange and disquieting spectacle which drew forth the censure of Pollen quoted above. Notice his use of the word “defiling”, rather than the more usual “filing along the street”, which is quite correct, but one can not help feeling that it carried with it a sense of moral disgust. At the same time, however, I cannot help forming the impression that there is also a certain prurient attraction in the description of “uncovered necks” adorned with “gaudy trinkets”. This new peopling of space was to be encountered not only on the streets but also in textile factories themselves as women took over weaving and other processes, colonizing the sheds and floors of factories producing cotton, worsted, or linen. Here was a further cause for concern as, although in some mills workpeople performed their duties in familial groupings, in other factories they did not and men were given supervisory positions. If the male presence was there to exercise control, male authority might, nevertheless, be diminished by the presence of so many women. The place of men as the figures of authority, if not overturned, might at least be challenged by large congregations of women, in one place. This, together with deskilling in the industry, where women, even girls, took charge of weaving, was probably another source of concern about women’s employment in factories and ambivalent attitudes to mill girls. Again, Baker, the factory inspector, in the passage quoted earlier from his 1839 report, goes on to express the view that many mill girls, “Become independent and ungovernable and are avoided by those overlookers who have the sense to notice this difference and the courage to apply their wisdom.”14

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Figure 8.1 Interior of Marshall’s Flax Mill (Penny Magazine 30th December, 1843, p501) Figure 8.1 from the Penny Magazine of December, 1843 (A Day in a Leeds Flax Mill) depicting one of the floors of Marshall’s Mill in Leeds, hints at what has been suggested – note the solitary male figure (just visible, extreme right) amongst a population of young women who tend machines.

We will now turn to the principal image of this chapter, The Dinner Hour Wigan, by the artist Eyre Crowe. Crowe (1824-1910) was the son of a novelist, historian and journalist who, for some years, was the Paris correspondent for the Morning Chronicle. He was educated in France and studied art, there. He was also a friend of Thackeray, who he had accompanied on his tour of America, in the capacity of secretary. His artistic output in England is mainly characterized by genre and historical subjects but he could occasionally produce a work of shrewd social observation, as in the many pencil sketches he made illustrating the injustices committed on blacks in America. This social observation is realised, again, in his painting, The Dinner Hour, a work of 1874.

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Figure 8.2 Eyre Crowe, The Dinner Hour, Wigan (Courtesy ©Manchester City Art Galleries) The subject is a scene in a heavily industrialised area of Wigan, where mill girls and women have assembled outside their places of work to relax and enjoy their lunch. The women occupy the foreground, their lunch accoutrements set out on the cobbled street, while factories, with their chimneys streaming smoke, occupy the middle distance and background. It is as if Crowe were painting some satire on those classical scenes of nymphs disporting themselves against a background of a great natural forest, which has, here, become hideously transformed. Perhaps this was at the back of his mind when he composed this picture. The first thing that strikes us, is the number of women displayed, left to right, across the canvas and also occupying some middle ground positions. It is, indeed, a panorama of female groupings, each, in its way, telling a tale. Reading from left to right, one woman pores over a letter (a love letter?), while her companion turns aside; others converse; one pair seem to console one another; others eat, guzzle, even, after their morning’s labour while to the far right there is one woman who stands shouting to another and, apparently, tossing her something, perhaps apples. Almost central and aloof, well in the background, is a solitary male figure, in a long coat. It is uncertain whether this is a policeman or an

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employer or a factory owner and this is possibly a deliberate blurring of the role, so as not to disguise the principal point; that of male authority. At the same time the male figure, by his isolation, emphasises the femininity of the scene, however, this is also a somewhat threatening figure and represents, perhaps, order and authority amid the female crowd. In this respect, one might also ask whether or not there is some phallic symbolism in the chimneys, but this may be reading further than Crowe intended. Indeed, the intention may have been to suggest unremitting labour, in the way the chimneys continue to issue smoke despite the lunch break and are a constant reminder of the position that these women occupy.

Conclusion The Industrial Revolution and the factory system of production have been interpreted as a development that changed our whole conceptualisation of society and its social and economic relationships. Along with population growth, it also led to increasing urbanisation, especially in industrialising areas, but industrialisation and the factory did more than this, one effect being a new ordering of urban space. This has been widely recognised in terms of the social and economic - in other words class zonings in some towns and cities, but it is argued here that this also brought about a new organisation of space in terms of day-to-day social interactions. The ebb and flow of a tide of working people, often young women, to and from the factory, was something quite new at the beginning of the nineteenth century and an experience that was not present in the lifeworld of people who lived in the eighteenth century. I would also argue that this had a regional dimension. If we look at figures for the occupations of women from the 1851 census for Britain, one of the largest categories of women’s employment was in the textile industry - 272,000 female operatives in the cotton industry alone located largely in Lancashire. In other industries, women were not so numerous. The largest number of industrial workers employed in anything like factories, was the 11,000 women who worked in the pottery industry. In mining, they had been prohibited from working underground since the Mines Act of 1842, although there were about 9,000 female surface workers; there were few employed in the iron and steel industries (a mere 590); on the railways there were 54 women working in industrial employment, rather than in refreshment rooms or as cleaners.15 In other words, factory employment for women was, predominantly, employment in the textile industry where the largest numbers might be encountered. The principal locations of this industry were in Lancashire

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and Yorkshire, not forgetting Strathclyde and Dundee. To this extent, it was regional and I suggest that the developments I have outlined did not take place on the same scale, in other parts of England, despite similar developments in the Midlands and pockets of factory work for women in London. The point is that the Northern experience was not in isolated patches, to be found here and there, as such factory work gave rise to whole towns, even to whole regions, where many towns were devoted to similar forms of factory production and organisation. This, in turn, gave rise to distinctive patterns of everyday life, even distinctive forms of dress; the mill girl, with canvas apron and shawl over the head, was not to be found in many other parts of England, and not in rural areas, where the sun-bonnet was the favoured and most practical covering for the head. Women, thus attired, going out to factories in crowds to earn their living, was a new social phenomenon located largely in the new social and spatial organisation of the industrial towns of the Central Pennines, one that repelled some, while it intrigued others. The folk song quoted earlier, which seems to encapsulate the situation so well, ends thus: Where are the girls? I’ll tell you plain, The girls have gone to weave by steam, And if you’d find ‘em you must rise at dawn, And trudge to the mill in the early morn.16

1 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (London, 1930). 2 For example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987); Jane Rendall, Women in an Industrialising Society: England 1750-1880 (Oxford, 1990); Elizabeth Roberts, Women Workers 1840-1940, (Cambridge, 1995); Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). 3 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes. 4 For a good summary see, for example, Edward Royle, Modern Britain: A Social History 1750-1985 (London, 1992, Chapter 2). 5 M. Ratcliffe, W. H. Chaloner eds., A French Sociologist Looks at Britain, (Manchester, 1977) 92. 6 Ibid. 104. 7 C. Aspin ed., Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Helmshore, 1972) 110-122. 8 A.L. Lloyd, The Iron Muse: A Panorama of Industrial Folk Song, (London, 1963) no pns.

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9

Statistical Committee Report, (P.P., 1839:26). Quoted in Pinchbeck, Women Workers. 199-200. 11 J.H. Pollen, Narrative of Five Years at St Saviour’s, Leeds (Oxford, 1851) 3. 12 Little work has been carried out on the crowd other than studies of political gatherings and mob violence. A more thorough treatment of the subject is N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998). 13 Quoted in City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, Local Studies Department, Saltaire: the Origins of a Model Industrial Community (Bradford, 1976) 11. 14 Statistical Committee Report, (1839: 26). 15 Census 1851; Elizabeth Roberts, Women’s Work, 1840-1940 (Cambridge, 1995); Angela V. John, Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 18001914 (Oxford, 1986). 16 Lloyd, Iron Muse. 10

CHAPTER NINE THE POLITICS OF THE WORKING-CLASS SUBURB: WALTHAMSTOW, 1870-1914 TIM COOPER

The rise of suburbia was one of the most significant social changes in Britain after 1850. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Greater London, where between 1861 and 1921, the population of the extra-mural suburbs (those outside of the London County Council administrative area) rose from 414,000 to 2,996,000.1 Until recently, the growth of suburbs was thought to have played a crucial role in the emergence of the Conservative political hegemony between 1885 and 1902.2 This interpretation of suburban politics was first expounded by James Cornford in 1963 and has been restated since. Savage and Miles, for instance, argue that “Once underway ... suburbanisation had a widespread impact. It created generally middle-class areas which formed an increasingly solid bedrock of Tory support”.3 Philip Waller has summarised the whole interpretation thus: Suburbia tended to Conservatism in politics, a counterweight to urban Radicalism and socialistic collectivism, which were hated for their high spending egalitarian tendencies… Perspicacious Tory politicians took account of these tendencies in the redistribution of constituency boundaries in 1885.4

More recently, however, this view of the political impact of suburbanisation has been criticised, along with the “electoral sociology” approach to political history, of which it forms part. A number of studies have revealed that suburbs were neither reflexively Conservative, nor socially homogenous. Frans Coetzee has demonstrated that in nineteenthcentury Croydon, local Liberal parliamentary candidates actually performed relatively well, seriously threatening Conservative control; suggesting that the image of suburbia as an automatic Tory stronghold is misleading.5 Elsewhere, Tom Jeffrey argues that the suburbs of the interwar era were not monadic Tory bastions, preferring to place the politics of

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these areas within a more dynamic framework.6 Mark Clapson also challenges the image of the intrinsically conservative suburb, highlighting the suburban basis to the politics of the “Middle Way” in the post-war era.7 These revisionist perspectives raise important problems for understanding the nature of suburban politics; indeed, they even tend to suggest that the search for a peculiarly suburban politics is flawed. They have, however, neglected to address the working-class suburb. This is an important omission because, in terms of population, working-class suburbs were among the largest and fastest growing of suburban areas. In 1901, just four working-class suburbs, Tottenham, East Ham, Walthamstow and Enfield, could boast a combined population of around 450,000. Despite the absence of a thoroughgoing investigation of their politics, workingclass suburbs have come to be viewed as a factor tending toward the ‘deradicalisation’ of late-Victorian working-class culture and politics. This is in large part due to Gareth Stedman-Jones’s argument that working-class suburbanisation contributed to the movement away from a work-centred culture that undermined artisan Radicalism.8 By looking in detail at the actual political experience of one suburb, in this case Walthamstow, this chapter challenges this view and attempts to show that Radicals could successfully operate within a working-class suburb. Radicals contested the social and political identity of suburbia, especially through municipal politics and the struggle for local democracy. In turn, they faced strong opposition from anti-democratic and anti-populist forces represented by an alliance of Conservatives and former Liberals within the ‘Moderate’ movement. The suburb was a battleground in which class played an important role in efforts to promote, or retard, democratic politics. Walthamstow underwent a remarkable transformation between 1870 and 1914, when the parish’s population increased from just 10,000 to some 125,000 people.9 Until the 1870s, Walthamstow was no more than a large Essex village with a population composed of a combination of wealthy city merchants, bankers and their servants, mixed with rural workers and more prosperous London shopkeepers, and a sprinkling of artisans who had moved away from the city.10 The parish constituted three separate villages: one centred on the parish church of St Mary; one in the west at St James’s Street; and another to the east at Wood Street.11 The beginnings of suburbanisation were indicated by the arrival of the railway in 1870, but rapid urban change only began in the 1880s, with the fastest expansion in the following decade.12 For Charles Booth’s study of London labour, Jesse Argylle described the inhabitants of Walthamstow thus:

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Chapter Nine As a rule their condition assimilates to, but on the whole is better than, that of their kindred in Bethnal Green or Shoreditch, whilst the presence of those from other parts, more particularly of country people who have obtained work in London and settle here tends to raise the tone. As might be expected the wood and furniture trades are largely represented, and there are many of the better paid section of riverside workers warehousemen, etc; the building trades account for a good number and beyond this the occupants are, of course, of all kinds.13

Although predominantly populated by the working class, the new suburb was never socially homogenous. There were a substantial number of middle-class residents who constituted the core of the local elite. There was also a growing proportion of white-collar workers. In 1901, for instance, 11 percent of the occupied male population was classed as engaged in professional or commercial occupations and, by 1911, this figure had risen to 14 percent.14 Consequently, there was a degree of residential segregation within Walthamstow. In his description, Jesse Argylle revealed the differing social characteristics that various areas of the town exhibited. Hoe Street Ward was described as the “‘West End’ of Walthamstow … inhabited by well to do city men and smaller houses for clerks and those of professional grade”.15 Wood Street had the character of a country village, and Higham Hill was a “healthy northern district too remote from the railway to be troubled by newcomers of the poorer sort”.16 These social differences partly reflected the pre-urban structure of Walthamstow, in which the three villages of St James’s, Church Common and Wood Street had dominated the parish. Each followed its own developmental path, partly determined by their proximity to London. One of the natural results of urban development was that the village’s identity entered a period of flux and uncertainty. Descriptions of Walthamstow in the 1870s and early 1880s, naturally enough, tended to describe it as a parish or village, rather than a town.17 This partly reflected the real geography of Walthamstow and partly the existing residents’ identification of rural Walthamstow with the institutions of parochial government and the traditional political dominance of a wealthy local elite. Initially, limited development was seen as the most desirable path to pursue. The earliest suburban development in Walthamstow, from the 1850s, was based on the erection of freehold cottages for respectable artisans. Many Freehold Land Societies advocated the construction of suburban dwellings in places like Walthamstow in order to promote temperance and suffrage causes and to remove the respectable worker from the depraved influence of the city.18 One local developer of freehold

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estates, Ebenezer Clarke, defended his activities in his History of Walthamstow: The result of the division of the Freehold Land estates has been that many persons have been provided with commodious houses and neat gardens who previously had dwelt in habitations badly built, ill ventilated and at an inconvenient distance from their employment. It has brought many persons with their wives and families from the fog and smoke of London into a clearer atmosphere, and enabled others to purchase land and build their own houses. There are many who can date their first practical effort to provide for their future independence to these societies, and several journeymen mechanics have been raised, through their instrumentality, to the position of employers.19

Suburbanisation even offered to solve a political problem by allowing a limited number of the more desirable members of the working class, in effect, to purchase the suffrage. Clarke reported that 203 of 402 persons who claimed the vote on the County of Essex register did so on the basis of freehold property ownership.20 By 1875, there were 314 persons on the register in the Walthamstow Polling District who claimed the vote on the same basis.21 This paternalistic ideal of suburban development was shared by other members of the local elite, and even united political opponents. In 1877, David Morgan, the Conservative chairman of the Local Board stated that “I should like to see the lodger converted into a tenant and the tenant into a freeholder. Temperance, with hard work, self-denial, and forethought, are in God’s providence, the means to this end”.22 Walthamstow might develop, but only in limited ways that did not challenge middle-class control of the political structure of the town. In time, however, it became clear that this vision of Walthamstow would be challenged. From the 1880s, the construction of a mass of small dwellings by speculative developers signalled the beginning of the transformation that would make Walthamstow an urban working-class area. Inevitably, such development challenged the elite vision of Walthamstow as a centre of limited residence for a respectable minority. In turn, it prompted a defence of the character of the local community, which focused on Walthamstow’s rurality and the undesirability of urbanisation. Resistance to speculative development united middle-class and respectable working-class elements, taking the particular form of opposition to the provision of ‘urban’ services, thought to portend an end to the condition of rurality. At a public meeting preceding the Local Board election of 1877, Morgan was questioned over his views on the future of the town. One resident, Mr Hudson, “urged the Board to be very careful of the ratepayer’s money, and not to indulge in large works, but to keep

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Walthamstow a country parish as long as possible”.23 There was also opposition to the costs of urban development in the area. John Higham argued that the Great Eastern Railway Company’s plans to increase the provision for working-men on the railway should be opposed as: It would not be in the interest of the ratepayers for increased facilities to be given by the railway company for bringing greater numbers of the working-classes to the parish, as to increase the number of small houses 24 would materially increase the rates.

This sort of anti-development sensibility remained present throughout the 1880s. In 1882, there was opposition to draft by-laws proposed by the Local Board on the grounds that they would alter the structure of property use in the district and risked alienating the respectable enfranchised working class. At a public meeting of property-owners, a resolution was moved which stated that: The meeting viewed with deep concern and indignation the action of certain members of the Board in connection with the bye-laws relating to houses let in apartments by which the majority of inhabitants of the parish would be injuriously affected, their social status lowered, and much respected enfranchised residents degraded, by their houses let in apartments being liable to the same visitation as houses frequented by tramps, casuals and vagrants.25

This was more than a “growth revolt” against working-class development. After all, the membership of rural Walthamstow was perceived to include “respected enfranchised residents”, even if they were of working-class origin.26 Rather, opposition to suburbanisation was a defence of an idealised form of paternalistic community. To this extent the opposition to suburbanisation incorporated a political, as well as a social, vision of Walthamstow. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1880s it was clear that Walthamstow had an urban, rather than a rural, future and there was little that could be done to prevent development. As early as 1877, the Walthamstow Guardian had observed that resistance to the suburbanising trend was futile: We must be content to see the best sites in the neighbourhood devoted to building, which in its train will necessitate the acknowledgement in due time - not so far hence - that Walthamstow is no longer a village, though difficult to find another term for it.27

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The town’s growing working-class community, as predicted, fundamentally altered the social and political character of Walthamstow. Working-class political leaders sought to promote a politics that they believed better reflected the new town’s working-class identity. One figure played a particularly important role in the emergence of Radicalism in Walthamstow. In 1886, an Irish Nationalist and Radical schoolteacher, James Joseph McSheedy, moved to the district.28 McSheedy, a naturally belligerent and outspoken individual, quickly became a dominant political figure with an openly articulated programme that aimed at uniting local radicals in opposition to the traditional elite. His work began with a campaign against alleged corruption in the Vestry’s administration of the charities, a struggle that continued until 1895. The campaign enjoyed some modest success; in 1890, for example, the Radicals managed to force the resignation of the exasperated Vestry Clerk, William Houghton. While the Vestry agitation served the useful purpose of galvanising Radicals against a traditional enemy, they were unable to make any significant advances in terms of local representation. This reflected the strong propertied bias of the electoral system that decided the membership of suburban Local Boards until the mid-1890s. It was the introduction of Urban District Councils in 1894, accompanied by the expansion of the local electorate and removal of the property qualification for membership, which opened the door to local representation for Radicals.29 It also enabled them to pursue the implementation of a democratic vision of Walthamstow which, it was argued, better represented the real nature of the suburb. In 1894, McSheedy was optimistic that the replacement of the Local Boards would allow the true character of the town, as a workingclass district, to flourish. Walthamstow, he said: [W]as a working-class locality. Now in a district like this, the only safeguard of the interests of the people is to be found in the general, intelligent, and continuous interest which they take in the good governance 30 and the pure and efficient administration of the affairs of the town.

Invoking the long tradition of Radical dissent, McSheedy continued: It was hoped that this Act would bring to the fore the Local Hampdens, who could now struggle more successfully for the rights of the people against mere social position and wealth…there would be no property or money qualification for the new councillors and that the voting was to be on the good principle of “One man, one vote” and that all members, even guardians would be chosen by ballot.31

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Although “the privileged classes of Walthamstow will make a big fight for their happily vanishing authority”, McSheedy was confident that, once the working class was united, “all the troubles and difficulties which have blocked the march of progress in this town will disappear as the mists in the morning sun”.32 This democratic vision of Walthamstow contrasts with the earlier paternalism of Clarke and Morgan. Radicals emphasised Walthamstow’s working-class identity and the necessity of struggle to attain local political and social dominance. At its root, the Radical struggle over Walthamstow’s identity as a place was a class struggle. This struggle was also reflected in the development of a local Radical news media that sought to articulate the working-class presence in Walthamstow and its political claims. The establishment of the Radical organ, the Walthamstow Whip, in 1897, was justified in terms of the neglect of working-class needs and interests in “traditional” or middleclass local journals. The want of a good newspaper has been very much felt in Walthamstow for years past. The oldest standing journal has always been recognised, in spite of assertions to the contrary, as being devoted principally to the wealthier classes, and, in consequence, those who are not wealthy do not accept it as their journal.33

This was an attack on the Walthamstow Guardian, which had monopolised the market in local news since the 1870s. The Whip’s politics reflected the logic of this belief that the working class had been actively ignored for too long. The paper stated that, in future local elections it would actively support working-class candidates to represent working-class wards: In the case of Walthamstow where the majority of inhabitants are workmen, there is no doubt that the majority of members on the governing body should be the more intelligent class of mechanics and labourers, if representation means anything at all. For how can a number of workmen be said to be “represented” by a professional or independent man, who presumably knows nothing of their wants and requirements and, in many cases, cares less.34

It is useful to contrast this position with the patrician assumption that had dominated earlier bourgeois accounts of Walthamstow. Increasingly, it was assumed that the town had conflicting class interests which had a right to their own separate representation. This vision of Walthamstow was in tune with the nature of social change in the district, and proved electorally successful, especially after 1897 when Radicals came to dominate the new Urban District Council. Between 1897 and 1913, with the exception of the

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period from 1901 to 1904, they exercised a controlling majority on the UDC. Apparently, a working-class Walthamstow was indeed also a Radical one.35 As if to confirm the triumph of the working class, many middle-class residents increasingly articulated a view that the quality of the community had irredeemably declined. The result was a flight of the bourgeoisie. Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, the churches and chapels complained of the removal of their wealthier members from the district and of the growing burden of finding the resources to expand their operations.36 By 1910, the Anglican Church in Walthamstow was heavily dependent on subsidies from the Bishop of St Albans Fund, in stark contrast to the situation in the 1870s, when a few wealthy contributors had donated most of the required funds. Despite this flight, however, the Radical vision of a working-class and democratic Walthamstow remained contested. Opposition to workingclass democracy manifested itself in a number of ways. One was the split that emerged within the Walthamstow Liberal caucus during the 1890s. As the McSheedyite Radicals, centred on the district of St James, grew in strength and articulated an increasingly working-class vision of the suburb, so middle-class Liberals in other parts of the district became alienated from the language, tactics and aims of McSheedyism. In 1894, these tensions poured forth in an open split within the ranks of Walthamstow Liberals. Divisions outside St James’s refused funds and electoral assistance to the “Jimmysites”, on the grounds that they were poisoning local politics with class interest.37 Although relations were partially patched up, working-class Radicals continued to be in regular conflict with middle-class members of the local Liberal party, with the consequence that, during the 1900s, some former Liberals, such as J.W. Dunford, preferred to ally with Tories in the newly-created Walthamstow Ratepayers’ Association, in order to oppose the Radicals.38 Out of the Ratepayers’ Association would emerge the ‘Moderate’ party that opposed the Radical dominated ‘Progressive’ alliance in the 1900s. The Ratepayers’ Association, and later the Moderates, adopted a line that abjured partisanship in local politics and presented their Radical opponents as representatives of a narrow clique of interests, condemning their aggressive political tactics as mere “hooliganism”.39 In particular, Moderates exploited growing fears over the affordability of local services, which expanded considerably under the local Radical administrations of the 1890s and 1900s. Such fears had formed a part of early opposition to mass suburbanisation. Now the financial question became the core of Moderate condemnations of Radicalism. It also provided the basis of an argument that attempted to legitimise the civic role of the middle class in

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the district. Moderates developed these ideas into an argument that the UDC should actively promote a mixed form of development for the district that would undermine the working-class monopoly and the political basis of Radicalism along with it.40 In 1912, the District Times protested that something should “be done to arrest the continual growth of [tenement] property which is such a drain on the district”.41 Directly confronting the Radical vision of the suburb, it argued that: It is very nice to be proud of the fact that Walthamstow is the dormitory for London workers, but we can easily foresee the time when residents will be driven from the more highly rated properties to seek less rated districts if the wholesale catering for democracy goes unchecked. Some misguided folk look upon the providers of tenement property as public benefactors in the development of the district, but their knowledge is of the most superficial nature, as a most cursory investigation will easily disclose the fact that every artisan family of five or more souls that comes into the district is a distinct burden to the more highly rated property of the town.42

The Moderates presented an explicitly anti-democratic alternative to the Radical democratic vision of Walthamstow; they criticised Radicals for doing away with the “men in authority in those days with a stake in the district they represented” and argued that the egalitarian vision of Walthamstow prompted “reckless extravagance” and “corruption”.43 Authority and paternalism were thus contrasted with spendthrift municipal socialism. In 1912, discussions over the making of a Town Plan gave further substance to these efforts to challenge the working-class suburb, as Moderates pressed for more mixed-class development to be included.44 The Moderate effort to revive a hierarchical vision of Walthamstow was assisted by the emergence of local history and efforts to preserve the historical memory of pre-urban Walthamstow. In February 1910, the Conservative District Times presented to its readers the idea that: The appreciation of the history and tradition of the district or township in which we reside has much to do with the fostering of good citizenship…the memory of these brings with it a pride in the place of our abode, a sense of its corporate individuality, and stimulates men to act in accordance with the best traditions of its history.45

In glowing terms it reported the efforts of George Bosworth, one of Walthamstow’s earliest local historians “who, by patient research, has collected material which, if arranged in a book form, would present a full and vivid history of the great suburb once called Wilcumstou”.46 Bosworth gave a series of lectures, entitled Walthamstow of Yesterday, in the winter of 1909-1910.47 His efforts to preserve the memory of an older non-

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working-class Walthamstow contributed to establishing the legitimacy of an alternative vision of the town. This use of local history to “foster good citizenship” had as much to do with challenging a Radical vision of working-class Walthamstow as it did with the pursuit of scholarship.48 The Moderate challenge to Radicalism met with increasing success during the 1900s, although a Moderate majority was only achieved in 1913 and it is unclear whether this would have proven sustainable before the Great War finally upset the political norms of the District. What is clear is that Moderation was an increasingly popular choice, and that it reflected the interests of particular suburban groups who felt neglected, or even persecuted, by Radical-Progressivism. A key point, in this respect, is the changing economic and social structure of Walthamstow. By the 1900s, suburban growth was slowing and, as suggested above, much of the growth that did take place encouraged the migration of new white-collar groups to the area. Walthamstow was also beginning to develop its own economic infrastructure and there were increasing numbers of local tradesmen serving the local community. To these new groups the question of rates was often of greater importance than abstract questions of representation. Radicals had difficulties appealing to these groups. After the reform of local government in the 1890s, the Radical argument that Walthamstow required democratising seemed an increasingly abstract problem compared to the issue of how to afford the local services needed by a large and complex urban community. Worse, the traditional Radical language of class explicitly excluded these groups of “shallow pated, flatchested, round-shouldered, miserably paid clerks”.49 By the end of the 1900s, therefore, the classic moment of suburban Radicalism appeared to have passed in Walthamstow, ironically because the suburban migration process was itself changing. The evidence from Walthamstow suggests that Radicals had no difficulty in building a variant of metropolitan Radicalism in the suburbs. Rather than declining into a sort of complacent domesticity, Radicals found sufficient resources to challenge the political dominance of existing suburban elites. In part, the very nature of suburban development was a key variable in the transition of Radicalism to Walthamstow. Early efforts to secure a politically and morally acceptable version of development by native middle-class residents were swept away by speculative development for profit. In turn, the tight social and political control that this class exercised over the district was ceded and the doors opened to Radicalism. By 1900, after a series of large Radical electoral victories, Walthamstow looked like a securely working-class, democratic and Radical space. Yet, there remained strong opposition to Radicalism among

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both Liberals and Conservatives who, through the Moderate alliance of the 1900s, were able to articulate a counter-vision to the democratic politics of Radicalism. This vision emphasised the economic costs of municipal undertakings and claimed that only a mixed-class district, led by a ratepaying elite, could run local affairs in the future. This challenge to the Radical vision of an exclusively working-class space, drew increasing strength from the slowing pace of suburban migration to Walthamstow in the 1900s, and from an increasing proportion of white-collar workers and native trades-people in the district. By the end of the 1900s, the momentum that had sustained Radicalism during the 1890s was diminishing. The politics of class remained of vital importance, particularly in the rise of local socialist movements, but that is another story. 1

P.J. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England, 1850-1914 (Oxford, 1983), 25. J. Davis, A History of Britain, 1885-1939 (London, 1999), 31; M. Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914 (Edinburgh, 1990), 66-7; D. Steele, Lord Salisbury, A Political Biography (London, 1999), 160. 3 J. Cornford, ‘The Transformation of Conservatism’, Victorian Studies, 7 (1963); Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 67; H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 18751898, (Oxford, 1995), 180; M. Savage and A. Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840-1940 (London, 1994), 63. 4 Waller, Town, City and Nation, 153. 5 F. Coetzee, “Villa Toryism Reconsidered: Conservatism and Suburban Sensibilities in Late-Victorian Croydon”, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 29-47. 6 T. Jeffrey, “The suburban nation: politics and class in Lewisham”, in D. Feldman and G.S. Jones eds., Metropolis. London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London, 1989), 189-209. 7 M. Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA (Oxford, 2003), 169-90. 8 G. Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983), 218. 9 P.C. Plummer and W.H. Bowyer, A Brief History of Courtenay Warner and Warner Estate (2000), 4. 10 G. Houghton, Walthamstow Past and Present (1929), 21-30. 11 Walthamstow Guardian, January 20, 1877. 12 R. Wall, “A History of the Development of Walthamstow, 1850-1900” (M.Phil. diss., London University, 1968), 11. 13 J. Argylle, “Walthamstow”, in C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Poverty Series, Vol. 1, (London, 1902), 260. 14 Accounts and Papers (P.P. 1902, CXVIII), Population of England and Wales 1901, 80-1; Accounts and Papers (P.P. 1912-13, CXI), Population of England and Wales 1911, 394-5. 15 Argylle, ‘Walthamstow’, 260. 2

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Ibid. See Walthamstow Guardian, Saturday 20 January, 1877; Saturday 3 March, 1877. 18 M. Chase, “Out of Radicalism: The Mid-Victorian Freehold Land Movement”, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 319-45. My thanks are due to Malcolm Chase for allowing me to see a related but unpublished conference paper on ‘Converting Thrift into Consumption: Working-class Home Ownership’. 19 E. Clarke, The History of Walthamstow (Walthamstow, 1861), 46 20 Ibid. 21 Essex Record Office, W/46/7, Register of Voters for Walthamstow Polling District, 1875. 22 Walthamstow Guardian, April 14, 1877. 23 Stratford Express, March 31, 1877. 24 Ibid. 25 Walthamstow Guardian, July 29, 1882. 26 M. Baldassare, ‘Suburban Communities’, Annual Review of Sociology, 18, (1992), 475-494. 27 Walthamstow Guardian, April 14, 1877. 28 J. Shepherd, “The Lib Labs and English Working-class Politics, 1874-1906” (Ph.D. diss, London University, 1980), 223. 29 On the Local Government Act of 1894 see: E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone (Cambridge, 1992) 319328; J. Moore, “Liberalism and the Politics of Suburbia: Electoral Dynamics in Late Nineteenth-century South Manchester”, Urban History 30 (2003), 245; P. A. Readman, “The Role of Land and Landscape in English Cultural and Political Debate c.1880-1910” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2002), 272-5. 30 Walthamstow Guardian, October 26, 1894. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Walthamstow Whip, January 16, 1897. 34 Walthamstow Whip, February 13, 1897. 35 Unfortunately there is no space here to develop the intricacies that lie behind this statement. The Radicals’ successes in the local sphere were translated into successes on the parliamentary level in a complex way, and partly through compromises that played a role in undermining extreme Radicalism based on class and promoting the development of a more quiescent Progressivism. For details of this see T. Cooper, ‘The Politics of Radicalism in Suburban Walthamstow’, (Ph.D. diss, Cambridge University, 2005). 36 Vestry House Museum, Waltham Forest, W .83.1.5, St Mary’s Parish Magazine, May 1897, 9; Walthamstow Guardian, August 12, 1882. 37 Walthamstow Guardian, February 14, 1894. 38 Walthamstow Guardian, November 23, 1894. 39 District Times, April 11, 1902. 17

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On the rise of ‘Moderation’ in local elections see: K. Young, Local Politics and the Rise of Party: The London Municipal Society and the Conservative Intervention in Local Elections, 1894 –1963 (Leicester, 1975), 57 – 112. 41 District Times, September 6, 1912. 42 Ibid. 43 District Times, January 5, 1907. 44 National Archives (NA), HLG/4/2413, Walthamstow Urban District Council Town Planning Scheme. 45 District Times, February 25, 1910. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Patrick Joyce has identified similar processes occurring in the making of Victorian provincial civic histories, see P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class (Cambridge, 1994), 181. 49 Walthamstow Reporter, March 29, 1901.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tim Cooper is lecturer in modern British history at the Cornwall Campus of Exeter University, where he researches and teaches political and environmental history. Between 2004 and 2006 he was a research fellow at the AHRC Centre for Environmental History in St Andrews. He completed his doctoral thesis on nineteenth-century Radicalism in Walthamstow at Cambridge University in 2004. He is currently working on a monograph on suburban politics. Barry Doyle is Assistant Dean Research in the School of Social Sciences and Law at the University of Teesside. He has published extensively on early twentieth century urban politics, including articles in the Historical Journal and Urban History and is currently working on the politics of preNHS hospital provision in Middlesbrough. Shane Ewen is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural History at Leeds Metropolitan University. His research focuses on the growth and regulation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British cities. Recent publications include: “Managing Police Constables and Fire-Fighters: Uniformed Public Services in English Cities, c.1870-1930’, International Review of Social History, 51, 2 (2006), 41-67; ‘Preparing the British Fire Service for War: Local Government, Nationalisation and Evolutionary Reform, 1935-41’, Contemporary British History, 20, 2 (2006), 209-231; and ‘The Internationalization of Fire Protection: in Pursuit of Municipal Networks in Edwardian Birmingham’, Urban History, 32, 2 (2005), 288307. Bob Hayes is editor of the North West Labour History Journal. His research interests include the compulsory labour of patients detained in Lancashire’s public asylums, radical preachers and labour movement commemoration and heritage.

192

Contributors

Nick Hayes lectures in modern and contemporary British History at Nottingham Trent University. He has published widely on housing and the building industry, but has recently returned to his ‘intellectual roots’, working on local political and social elites. He is currently examining ways in which a person’s house defines and redefines class and status. Bill Luckin is Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester and Research Professor in Urban History at the University of Bolton. He is also co-editor of Social History of Medicine. He is currently writing a general history of road traffic accidents in twentieth century Britain. The author of a number of books and numerous articles, Bill Luckin's most recent publication is 'Revisiting the Idea of Urban Degeneration in Urban Britain, 1830-1900', Urban History, 33, 2006, 234-52. George Sheeran works in the School of Lifelong Education and Development at the University of Bradford where he is the Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) and head of the Pennine and Yorkshire Studies Unit. His areas of research and teaching are in urban history, architectural history and eighteenth century landscape. Peter Shapely is lecturer in Modern History at the School of History and Welsh History, University of Wales Bangor. His main area of research is modern British urban history and his publications include Charity and Power in Nineteenth Century Manchester, (Manchester, 2000) and Power, Policy and Consumers: Urban Culture and the Politics of Twentieth Century Housing, forthcoming, 2007. Geoff Timmins is Head of History and Professor, Department of Humanities, University of Central Lancashire. He has published extensively on economy, society and housing in Lancashire, including Made in Lancashire: A History of Regional Industrialisation (Manchester University Press, 1998). Richard H Trainor has been Principal and Professor of Social History at King’s College London since 2004. He is the author of Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialised Area 1830-1900 (1993), co-author of University, City and State: The University of Glasgow since 1870 (2000) and co-editor (with R J Morris) of Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (2000). He is currently writing a social history of the British middle class 1850-1950.