The following scholars will be presenting their work at the conference. Clicking their names will bring you back to the top of the page.
EVE COLPUS, University of Oxford
‘The screen is two-way’: That’s Life!, television and social
activism in Britain, 1973–1994
This paper addresses the consumer affairs television series That’s
Life!, broadcast on BBC One between 1973 and 1994 and its contribution to
evolving understandings of social activism in late-twentieth-century Britain. That’s
Life! boasted huge audiences in the 1970s and 1980s, marketing itself as a
programme based upon viewers’ issues. This paper explores the tension between That’s
Life!’s stimulation and distillation of viewers’ voices through examining the
letters viewers sent in to That’s Life! and their outcomes, and the programme’s
contribution to the establishment of a telephone helpline (ChildLine), as a
space where children could talk for themselves. Through analysing these
vehicles of communication – discussed also in BBC records, newspapers and
sociological studies – I argue we can retrieve an untold story about postwar
civil society, illuminating its transitions between the realms of popular culture,
social policy and individual identify formation and between social and emotional
experience and cultural representation.
I hope to contribute to discussions at the Burdens
conference about the meanings and operations of civil society, periodisations
of post-1945 Britain and historical approaches. Scholars continue to discuss
postwar economic, political and social history in terms of shifts from ‘social
democracy’ to ‘neo-liberalism’, public service to ‘market’ models and ‘social justice’
to politics of identity. The evidence that I uncover reveals that we cannot map
these linear developments onto individuals’ experience. The men and women who
watched That’s Life! conceptualised social activism as both individual forms of
confrontation and collective compassion, while the children the telephone
helpline targeted negotiated the opportunity of a new social resource and
restrictions upon their access. In investigating these attitudes, how they were
represented and in their historical contexts, I uncover the complexity of
processes of mediation and of individuals’ claims to agency that underpinned social
activism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, I suggest
the value of television as a multi-dimensional source for studying postwar
history, and the possibility it holds for writing a history of experience and
representation in an interconnected mode.
Bio
Since completing her Ph.D. at Oxford on the topic, “Landscapes
of welfare: concepts and cultures of British women’s philanthropy c. 1918–1939,”
Eve has worked as a Research Associate on two projects: ‘Religious faith, space
and diasporic communities in East London: 1880–present’, and currently at the
Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford. She is developing a new
project entitled ‘The “Busybody” in post–1945 Britain’, which will examine the
attitudes and practices of everyday informal social governance as a frame for analyzing
the shifting fault lines of domesticity, civil society and privacy, and the material
needs and benefits of social intervention in the post-1945 world. In doing so, she
aims to shed new light upon the relationship between the individual and society
in postwar British history and to suggest a new way of considering social and
emotional history through focusing on the power dynamics of ‘gate-keeping’. Her
paper at Burdens presents early findings from this research.
CHARLOTTE GREENHALGH, University of Oxford
Aging,
emotion, and the welfare state in postwar Britain
In this paper I reconsider the relationship between old age
and the welfare state. Historians have noted the centrality of these themes to
mid twentieth-century public life but, perhaps typically of postwar British
history, have left private life out of the picture. I explore how the emotional
lives of older Britons became valid points of social and intellectual inquiry
and motivation for state action as well as the focus of contestation between
social scientists, policy makers, and administrators of welfare institutions. These
groups articulated differing notions of emotional and psychological need as
they redefined the social problem of old age as being about emotional life as
much as social isolation or physical decline. By exploring the status and
treatment of older people living in residential care in the late 1950s, I
demonstrate ongoing debate over these new conceptions of individual need and
state obligation among local authority administrators, social workers, and
older Britons.
At the Burdens conference I hope to contribute to
discussions of the influence of the state, archival material, and academic
disciplines on postwar history. Mid-century attempts to shape the emotional
experience of ageing through welfare services demonstrate that we cannot
sharply demarcate the history of the state and private life in this period.
Surveys of private life and theories of selfhood influenced welfare legislation
and the development of social services, which, in turn, aimed to intervene in
some of the most intimate arenas of everyday life. Older people encountered and
contributed to this public, intellectual, and political project during Peter
Townsend’s 1958–1959 visits to residential homes for his study “The Last Refuge”
and his research notes are a key source for this paper. My research traces how
the emerging disciplines of sociology and psychology prescribed attention to the
emotional and psychological states of the general population and pioneered
methods of interviewing which both encouraged and recorded the mid-century
practices of self reflection and storytelling that lie at the heart of my own
archival research.
Bio
Charlotte is a PhD Candidate at Oxford, working on a
dissertation entitled “Ageing, identity, and emotion: Subjective experiences of
old age in mid twentieth-century Britain.” In the future, she hopes to continue
researching and teaching the history of emotions and the life-cycle.
RAJBIR P. HAZELWOOD, Washington University, St. Louis
The Punjabi-U.K. diaspora and the politics of violence and disorder,
c.1975–1985
Today there are nearly a million people of Punjabi ‘origin’
in the United Kingdom. Most arrived post-1947, after the departure of their
British colonizers and the bloodshed of Partition, which divided the province
of Punjab between the newly independent nation-states of India in the east, and
Pakistan in the west. These postwar labor migrants and their families were
joined in the 1960s and 1970s by Punjabi Sikhs expelled or uprooted from East
Africa, following the independence and Africanization policies of Uganda,
Kenya, and Tanzania. The focus of my larger project is on the material and
cultural practices by which this diverse group of Punjabi migrants, from
voluntary or forced, to legal or illegal, has historically constituted a sense
of belonging, identity, and community in the U.K. I am concerned in the
dissertation with unraveling the ways in which Punjabi migrants have imagined,
practiced, and claimed stakes to multiple nodes of belonging. In this paper I
offer a brief overview of the larger project and examine more specifically the
ways in which belonging and community have been articulated amongst Punjabi
migrants through a politics of disorder and violence. Via a series of oral histories
I show how Punjabi diasporic subjectivity, specifically in the West London
suburb of Southall, has been articulated through memories of state, racial, and
personal violence. Further, I suggest these memories converge around a common
set of violent social ruptures; convergences that have implications for our
understanding of postwar historical chronologies and archives.
Bio
Rajbir is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St.
Louis. She is working on the Punjabi diaspora in urban Britain in the second
half of the twentieth century. This year, she is graduate fellow for the
Migration, Identity, and State initiative at Washington University and is
currently teaching a class on food and identity in twentieth century world
history.
ANDREW KEATING, University of California, Berkeley
ANDREW KEATING, University of California, Berkeley
Imperial commemoration and national culture in postwar
Britain
Only several months after the Second World War began, the
Imperial War Graves Commission resolved that the commemoration of British dead
would aesthetically mimic the style of the Great War. The cemeteries and
memorials it constructed in the postwar period thus manifested the architecture
and iconography initially developed at the height of the British Empire’s
global reach. By 1967 the Labor Under-Secretary of State for the RAF told the
House of Commons he considered it self-evident that military fatalities should
be returned to their families for burial. The British State’s relationship to
the bodies of its soldier dead as well as the cultural meanings associated with
them had shifted dramatically in a relatively short period of time that also
coincides with the demise of British imperial claims.
This paper examines the changing characteristics of
commemoration during the postwar period and concludes that shifts in policies
and practices toward dead soldiers manifested the excision of empire from
British national culture. The Second World War cemeteries and dedication
ceremonies of the late 1940s and 1950s closely mimicked those of the 1920s and 1930s,
despite the dramatically changed role of Britain and the British Empire in the
world. Imperial commemoration of the war dead as well as the British State’s
desire to perpetuate the idea of imperial hegemony persisted culturally in
these ways even after Indian independence and during the decade of Suez.
Furthermore, once Britain decided in the late 1960s that it would no longer
bury dead soldiers abroad, the public began to forget the imperial meanings
originally associated with the cemeteries of the world wars. Returning dead
soldiers to their families allowed British national identity to be reconfigured
around home instead of empire.
Bio
Andrew received his Ph.D. in modern British history from UC
Berkeley in 2011. He is currently revising his dissertation on the politics and
meanings of British war commemoration into a book manuscript, tentatively
titled "The Empire of the Dead."
ERIK LINSTRUM, Harvard
The truth about hearts and minds: Counterinsurgency and development in the postwar British Empire
Thanks to its reputation as the only successful counterinsurgency of the twentieth century, the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s has figured prominently in recent histories of military strategy. Yet an equally important context for the winning of “hearts and minds” is the model of rural development, which originated in the British Punjab in the 1920s and became a cornerstone of colonial and international policy in the 1940s. Whether termed “mass education,” “fundamental education,” or “community development,” this vision of uplift had much in common with the Malayan campaign: the extensive use of propaganda; the close attention to personal relationships; and above all, the delicate balance between coercion and persuasion. The parallels between counterinsurgency and development in the postwar empire raise an important question: why did British civilians and soldiers alike find it necessary to pay more attention to the thoughts and feelings of colonial subjects? One possible explanation is that the British did no such thing—that they only pretended to take account of popular sentiment to legitimize the continuation of imperial rule in the eyes of the world. In fact, however, officials did need to work with public opinion, because their strategy for the postwar empire—the diversion of colonial aspirations from constitutional reform to the ostensibly apolitical sphere of economic improvement—required it.
That, ultimately, was the trouble with “hearts and minds”: even as officials listened more closely to the people, they would only accept one kind of answer.
Bio
Erik is a Ph.D. student in History at Harvard, where he is writing a dissertation on the uses of psychology in the twentieth-century British Empire. He is currently an Ernest May Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and will join the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan later this year.
DANIEL S. LOSS, Brown
From “Redundant churches” to “an inheritance unequalled”: The aestheticization of England’s historic church buildings in the 1960s and 1970s
In the aftermath of the Second World War, England’s churches faced a problem: many of their church buildings were in desperate need of repair, and some of those in the worst shape were in rural areas with a local population unable to keep up with the costs of restoration and maintenance. This paper explores organized efforts to preserve the fabric of England’s Christian heritage, first through national campaigns designed to keep the responsibility of maintenance in the voluntary sphere, and later through recourse to state funding where voluntary efforts proved insufficient. Underlying this change was a shift in understandings of England’s church buildings from sites of prayer and religious practice to the physical embodiment of England’s architectural heritage, worthy of preservation even if they had become redundant and unnecessary as active places of worship. This aestheticization of England’s historic church buildings offers an intriguing case study of the postwar ‘heritage boom’ and helps us understand the enduring popular affinity for Christianity along cultural rather than religious lines.
ERIK LINSTRUM, Harvard
The truth about hearts and minds: Counterinsurgency and development in the postwar British Empire
Thanks to its reputation as the only successful counterinsurgency of the twentieth century, the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s has figured prominently in recent histories of military strategy. Yet an equally important context for the winning of “hearts and minds” is the model of rural development, which originated in the British Punjab in the 1920s and became a cornerstone of colonial and international policy in the 1940s. Whether termed “mass education,” “fundamental education,” or “community development,” this vision of uplift had much in common with the Malayan campaign: the extensive use of propaganda; the close attention to personal relationships; and above all, the delicate balance between coercion and persuasion. The parallels between counterinsurgency and development in the postwar empire raise an important question: why did British civilians and soldiers alike find it necessary to pay more attention to the thoughts and feelings of colonial subjects? One possible explanation is that the British did no such thing—that they only pretended to take account of popular sentiment to legitimize the continuation of imperial rule in the eyes of the world. In fact, however, officials did need to work with public opinion, because their strategy for the postwar empire—the diversion of colonial aspirations from constitutional reform to the ostensibly apolitical sphere of economic improvement—required it.
That, ultimately, was the trouble with “hearts and minds”: even as officials listened more closely to the people, they would only accept one kind of answer.
Bio
Erik is a Ph.D. student in History at Harvard, where he is writing a dissertation on the uses of psychology in the twentieth-century British Empire. He is currently an Ernest May Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and will join the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan later this year.
DANIEL S. LOSS, Brown
From “Redundant churches” to “an inheritance unequalled”: The aestheticization of England’s historic church buildings in the 1960s and 1970s
In the aftermath of the Second World War, England’s churches faced a problem: many of their church buildings were in desperate need of repair, and some of those in the worst shape were in rural areas with a local population unable to keep up with the costs of restoration and maintenance. This paper explores organized efforts to preserve the fabric of England’s Christian heritage, first through national campaigns designed to keep the responsibility of maintenance in the voluntary sphere, and later through recourse to state funding where voluntary efforts proved insufficient. Underlying this change was a shift in understandings of England’s church buildings from sites of prayer and religious practice to the physical embodiment of England’s architectural heritage, worthy of preservation even if they had become redundant and unnecessary as active places of worship. This aestheticization of England’s historic church buildings offers an intriguing case study of the postwar ‘heritage boom’ and helps us understand the enduring popular affinity for Christianity along cultural rather than religious lines.
Bio
Daniel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Brown University
where he is writing a dissertation on the changing place of Christianity in
English society and culture after the Second World War. His research has
been supported by grants from the Society for the Religious Research
Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Next year he will
be a Brown-Wheaton Faculty Fellow at Wheaton College.
CHRISTOPHER MOORES, University of Birmingham
British civil liberties NGOs, test cases strategies and
human rights politics in postwar Britain
This paper will discuss British NGOs and their use of global
human rights language and structures of transnational governance from the
1970s. In particular, it will discuss the British civil liberties lobby’s work
in relation to international rights institutions by examining at the work of,
amongst others, the National Council for Civil Liberties. It will demonstrate
that it was only during and beyond the 1970s that NGOs with national
constituencies effectively used a human rights discourse. This developed human
rights from being associated with legal/diplomatic elites or the freedoms of
non-British citizens overseas.
Arguably then, NGOs gave human rights a meaning beyond vague
support for a high-minded yet abstract concept. However, in doing so, human
rights became associated with socially, politically or culturally sensitive
issues, becoming a divisive rather than unifying politics. The result of this
was the creation of an on-going scepticism about human rights politics, and its
relevance to ‘mainstream’ British society. Furthermore, rights were reaffirmed
as products of legal structures. In locating rights activism within a legally
determinative, positivist framework, NGOs struggled in balancing the need to
protect the rights of those most vulnerable to infringements by state
institutions, with asserting the importance of human rights in less legalistic
social and cultural settings.
This paper aims to engage with the themes of the conference
in a number of ways. Most obviously, it will assess how international
structures of governance related to national social and political issues, and
the negotiation between national and transnational conceptions of rights.
Additionally, it will query two chronologies relating to human rights, namely,
the importance of the post-1945 reconstruction, and then a developing
historiography which claims the 1970s to be the pivotal decade in human rights history.
CHARLES SMITH, Loughborough
CHARLES SMITH, Loughborough
New law but no new deal? Gay men and “the permissive
society”, 1967–c.1985
Recent work in the history of same sex desire in Britain has
challenged the idea of the post war period as one of unique sexual license.
This work, which Chris Waters has dubbed the ‘new queer history’, has
emphasised the diversity and vibrancy of queer cultures in Britain’s past,
questioning what it sees as a popular ‘Whiggish‘ vision of pre war oppression
followed by post war liberalisation, characterised by some as ‘the Permissive
Society.’ Yet these histories usually stop before the 1960s and propose no post
war narrative to replace the one they have questioned. Seemingly dramatic
events such as the decriminalisation of sex between men in 1967 have been
dismissed, unstudied beyond reference to the headline arrest rate.
This is despite efforts by gay men themselves in the
seventies and eighties to record and archive their experiences with the police
and the courts. They did this through a series of Gay NGOs and an openly gay
press which did not exist before the change in the law. This paper will use these records to describe
the changing relationship between the law and gay men after 1967 and the
response of the law to these new emerging public institutions of gay life, in
light of the insights provided by the recent scholarship on earlier eras. It will argue that, despite decriminalisation
being a limited reform, it allowed gay men the chance to interact with the law,
government and civil society in a new way and was part of a fundamental change
in the social organisation of same sex relations. It will suggest that the concept of the
Permissive Society is still a useful one for historians of post-1945 Britain
but needs more nuanced study.
Bio
Charles is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Politics,
History and International Relations, Loughborough University. Before starting
his Ph.D. in 2009, he worked in a variety of Policy and Public Affairs roles,
in both parliament and the charity sector. His thesis, “The evolution of the
gay male public sphere, 1967–1985” charts the development of new public
institutions of gay male life, such as NGOs, clubs and magazines, in the era
after the limited decriminalisation of homosexual acts in 1967. He is also the
Co-chair of History Lab, the national network for postgraduate historians, at
the Institute for Historical Research.
JEAN P. SMITH, University of California, Santa Barbara
JEAN P. SMITH, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Persistence of “imperial” networks: Postwar British
migration to southern Africa
Most scholarship on decolonization has explored its
political and economic aspects. The cultural and social history of
decolonization is much less developed, though there is a significant literature
on how migration from former colonies dramatically changed the racial and
cultural make-up of the United Kingdom. This literature clearly demonstrates
the continuing legacy of British imperialism, as manifested in the physical
presence of former colonial subjects in the United Kingdom. But this shift to a
multi-cultural Britain was accompanied by another legacy of imperialism, the
ongoing migration from Britain to the so-called settler empire, including South
Africa and Rhodesia even as decolonization proceeded apace.
The impetus for migration was clear in the immediate postwar
years, characterized by austerity, rationing and housing shortages. Yet it
continued even as the economy improved in the 1950s and anti-colonial movements
intensified in Africa. Perhaps most surprising, British migration to both South
Africa and Rhodesia dramatically increased after these nations declared independence
from Britain and left the Commonwealth in 1960 and 1965 respectively. This in large
part was due to new incentives and subsidies provided by the South African and
Rhodesian governments to create a demographic defense of white supremacy and
minority rule. This newly assertive, racially-based policy was implemented at
the same time as the United Kingdom began to restrict immigration from the
former empire. The scholarly focus on immigration to the United Kingdom after
1945, I argue, has obscured the ways in which Great Britain remained a country
of emigration. By examining postwar British migration to Southern Africa and
the racial ideology it represented in the same analytical framework as postwar
migration into the United Kingdom and its impact, I argue that networks,
institutions and ideologies forged during formal imperialism persisted long
after its end.
Bio
Jean is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Her dissertation focuses on British migration to Southern Africa
from the Second World War to the 1970s, exploring this topic from the
perspective of British, South Africa and Rhodesian policy, the activities of
private migration organizations, and the experience of migrants. Based on archival
and oral history research in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Zimbabwe, she
argues for the importance of ongoing links between these countries through
migration, especially after South Africa and Rhodesia declared independence
from Britain in order to preserve racially-based minority rule in the 1960s.
NATALIE THOMLINSON, University of Cambridge
NATALIE THOMLINSON, University of Cambridge
Feminism, anti-racism and coalition politics in the radical
left, c. 1975–1985
The radical politics of the post-1968 era fundamentally
redefined the landscape of the British left as it did in other western
countries. A new politics that proclaimed the liberation of women, Blacks and
gays—amongst others—was a keenly felt presence in national life until at least
the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Yet, as historians, we have barely begun to
understand the complexity of these radical movements and the links between
them. For this paper, I will be concentrating on two feminist anti-racist
groups of the late 1970s, Women Against Racism and Fascism (WARF) and Women
Against Imperialism (WAI). These two groups were composed largely of white
socialist feminists organising against racism, fascism and imperialism. They
were part of a larger left movement against racism that peaked in the late
1970s, including groups such as the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), which had formed in
response to the growing threat of the National Front. WARF itself formed in
direct response to the sexism they experienced in male dominated groups such as
the ANL. However, like the ANL, neither WARF nor WAI were immune to criticism
from either Black radicals—who accused them of fundamentally misunderstanding
the nature of racism—or from fellow travellers in the Women’s Liberation
Movement, who saw their activities as a diversion from feminism. The
connections that WARF and WAI had with the WLM, the more traditional socialist
movement, and, to an extent, black radicalism, are fascinating in the extent
that they highlight both the interconnections and the tensions across these
sometimes very different lefts. This
paper will thus argue that these groups provide an excellent way of
understanding how the myriad concerns of the British left interacted and
competed in a way that resonates with the challenges faced by radicals across
the world during this era.
Bio
Natalie is currently studying for a Ph.D. at King's College,
Cambridge exploring race and race relations in the women's movement in Britain
in the post-1968 period. Her wider interests centre on the modern social
and cultural history of Britain, and in particular gender history and the
history of feminism. She is the lead
convener of the Gender and History Workshop at the history faculty in
Cambridge, and her first journal article "The Colour of Feminism: White
feminists and race in the Women's Liberation Movement" will be published
later this year in History.
TOM WRIGHT, York
TOM WRIGHT, York
A Very British punishment: The abolition of the death
penalty in Britain and her empire
In 1953 the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment published
its report into the death penalty. The Commission was appointed after the House
of Commons voted to abolish the death penalty, against the advice of Clement
Attlee’s Labour government. Their report would prove to be a turning point in
the history of capital punishment in Britain and triggered abolition movements
overseas. The abolition of capital punishment is a useful case study through
which to examine the British political process. The debates on abolition
exemplify the maintenance of representative democracy in Britain over a system
of greater popular involvement in politics. The opinions of politicians and key
informed individuals influenced the outcomes of the parliamentary votes on
abolition. The views of the general public were afforded little significance by
MPs.
Abolition was limited to British citizens. It would not
affect the military, Northern Ireland, British-controlled Germany or the
remaining colonies. However, it did influence the abolition processes in Canada
and New Zealand, two white settler dominions with similar political systems to
Britain. Politicians and lobbies in both countries looked to the British
example to inform their own debates. This paper will examine the political
process behind the abolition of capital punishment in Britain. It will then
consider Britain’s impact on the political processes in its former colonies and
the reasons for not extending abolition to those colonies over which it
retained control. Though Britain was not the first state in the
English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment, it had the greatest
influence over the other abolition processes.
Bio
Tom is a Ph.D. student at the University of York researching
the abolition of capital punishment in Great Britain. His work is a development
of his Masters thesis, which established the role of the retentionists in the
abolition process. He hopes to demonstrate that capital punishment adopted an
unusual place on Britain’s political agenda. The House of Commons unwaveringly
supported its abolition in full knowledge of the depth of support for its
retention from the majority of the population. His broader research interests
include the permissive reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, legal and constitutional
developments after 1945 and representative democracy. You can follow his work on academia.edu and on twitter.
TAL ZALMANOVICH, Rutgers
TAL ZALMANOVICH, Rutgers
“The Great unwashed! That’s what we are, mate”: Homes and
social mobility in postwar sitcoms
WWII brought destruction, dislocation and devastation to the
shores of Britain. When the war ended, politicians, state and local organizations,
civilians, refugees, and veterans were forced to turn their attention to the
home and its reconstruction. The transition homewards, acknowledged by
contemporaries, was reinforced through the growing prominence of television in
British life. In this paper, I will argue that as television became an honorary
member in the British family during the 1950s, it redefined the postwar public
sphere.
Television’s popular outreach created a shared vocabulary for the discussion of various topics, including domesticity and social mobility. In particular, I will suggest that television situation comedies were key sites where post-WWII Britons confronted the challenge of forging a shared national culture across social, racial, gender and generational divides. Based on multiple sources, this paper demonstrates that the image of home that emerges from sitcoms made between mid-1950 to 1980 was not uniform or idyllic. In sitcoms, the ugly side of family relations reared its head and roared with laughter. The portrayal of sour family relations and scarred-by-failure protagonists trapped by social circumstances reflects the social tensions that left postwar dreams of domesticity and social mobility out of reach for many Britons. The vision put forward to viewers was a reminder that class, gender, age and race still mattered in Britain.
Bio
Tal is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University. Her work
combines historical research with her experience as a journalist and her
interest in media, technology and popular culture. Her dissertation “Sharing a
Laugh: Sitcoms and the Creation of Post-Imperial Britain 1945–1980” uses the
little-explored history of sitcoms to open up fresh avenues of enquiry into
postwar society and culture. It reveals the dominance of television in the
contemporary public sphere and points to sitcoms as new sites of popular debate
and collective memory.
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MONOPOLY
Maurice Ambler for Picture Post, 1951