“Basically You Were Either a Mainstream Sort of Person or You Went to the Leadmill and the Limit”: Understanding Post-War British Youth Culture Through Oral History

2019 ◽  
pp. 233-259
Author(s):  
Sarah Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Post War

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

Comedy, Class, and Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Tew
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Cultural Commodification ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
Post War ◽  
Recurrent Motifs

This chapter studies the comic novel. If British and Irish culture in the post-war decades underwent some radical social and political upheavals, the novel registered and critiqued these transformations in part through the development of a particular comic mode. Comedy in British and Irish novels published from 1940 to 1973 often turned around the difficult intersection of class and nation. Alongside this overarching attention to class and nation, a number of other recurrent motifs can be traced in the comic novel of the period, such as the representation of cultural commodification, the decline of traditional values, and the emergence of new forms of youth culture. In the context of such widespread changes to the narratives that shaped public life, the comic novel expressed an ironic scepticism concerning the capacity of any cultural narrative to offer an adequate account of contemporary identities.

Working-Class Autobiography, c.1970–1985

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
Political Education ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Community Publishing

This chapter examines working-class autobiographies and oral history testimonies created in the 1970s by the ‘history from below’, oral history, and community publishing movements. It finds that most working-class autobiographers felt that class divisions had weakened and changed radically in the post-war years: they identified improvements in housing, the NHS, education, and the power of workers as key alterations. The disappearance of live-in domestic service was a particularly powerful symbol of the changes that had taken place. Though none thought class had disappeared, many thought class divides were less powerful. While some working-class autobiographers wrote that their experiences made them instinctive socialists, in fact political activism did not flow straightforwardly from experience, but was the result of political education and context. Working-class experience was highly diverse, and as this became clear to many in the community publishing movement, it led to changes in their activist practice in the 1980s.

scholarly journals THE TROUBLES WITH A LOWER CASE t: UNDERGRADUATES AND BELFAST'S DIFFICULT HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 219-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean O'Connell
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Lower Case ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

Oral History and Feminist Method

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Baby Boomers ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
With Memory ◽  
Life Course Analysis ◽  
Second Generation Migrants

The chapter unpacks the book’s method as a history of living activists, set in the context of feminism’s affiliation with oral history and life-course analysis. It discusses the S&A oral history archive on which the book is based, outlining how S&A approached interviewee selection and representation, and acknowledging how such questions continue to divide the movement. Offering an overview of feminist oral history practice, addressing the ethics involved and the interpretative challenges of working with memory, subjectivity and emotion, it shows how the ‘baby boomers’, ‘second generation migrants’ and ‘lesbian-feminists’ who powered the WLM were shaped by the post-war worlds in which they grew up, and talked back to these categories, particularly as they gained control over fertility. The chapter concludes with the story of Sue Lopez, women’s footballer and champion for women’s rights in the sport, demonstrating oral history’s ethical challenges whilst celebrating an inspiring athlete and campaigner. 149 words

scholarly journals The Co-Creation of a Retail Innovation: Shoppers and the Early Supermarket in Britain

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Alexander ◽  
Dawn Nell ◽  
Adrian R. Bailey ◽  
Gareth Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Value Creation ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Nationwide Survey ◽  
History Data ◽  
Reflective Activity ◽  
Self Service ◽  
Post War

In this paper we examine shoppers' reactions to the development of early supermarket retailing in post-war Britain. Positioning our discussion in relation to multi-disciplinary contributions on the role of consumers in innovation, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the shopper's input in the debate on retail innovation, including the supermarket. New oral history data drawn from a nationwide survey is presented in support of our arguments. Shoppers' contributions to the supermarket innovation are shown to be multi-faceted in nature, incorporating processes of co-production and value creation; processes that were altered in the transition from counter-service to self-service retail environments. Shoppers' discussions of such alterations were frequently structured around four aspects of interaction; with the physical environment of the store, with the goods for sale, with other shoppers and with shop staff. Whilst increasingly part of ‘ordinary consumption’ routines, the data highlights that in the switch to the supermarket, shopping became a more reflective activity and one that resulted in a variety of experiences and emotions.

Middle-Class Voices, c.1969–1979

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Common Culture ◽  
Upward Social Mobility ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Distinction ◽  
Middle Class People

This chapter uses three different source bases to examine middle-class attitudes towards class and social change in the 1970s: interviews from Paul Thompson’s Edwardians oral history project, the journalistic study Voices from the Middle Class, by Jane Deverson and Katharine Lindsay, and the diaries of an upwardly mobile man, deposited with Mass Observation. It argues that some older middle-class people in the 1970s still thought of class as something given by birth and breeding, and still felt comfortable voicing class prejudices. However, even among older generations, some recognized that such attitudes were no longer widely acceptable. Younger generations of the middle classes were far more heterogeneous, and many younger middle-class people rejected class distinction and tradition. Social change, particularly the expansion of upward social mobility in the post-war decades, meant the middle classes were more heterogeneous and less bound by a common culture.

Unpiecing the Jigsaw: Compulsive Heterosexuality, Sex Crime, Class and Masculinity in Early 1960s British Cinema

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-151
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Class System ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
Sexual Murder ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk

This article explores the discursive intersections of masculinity, class and heterosexual desire in the still undervalued British police procedural film, Jigsaw. It considers the film both as an example of a new style of cinematic crime narrative and as a significant conjectural text in which ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and marriage, especially in their post-war and mid-century forms, are re-articulated, here as compulsive heterosexuality: a masculine drive that can ultimately lead to sexual murder. The film's low-key naturalistic style owes much to the newly realist television drama of the period, while its identification of middle-class masculinity as the locus of transgression carries cultural resonances well beyond the ostensible project of the film's narrative. Released in 1962, Jigsaw was in effect squeezed between, on the one hand, the British New Wave and, on the other, the pop musicals and London-focused films that dominated cinema in the UK in the mid-1960s. However, the casting of dependable Jack Warner as the investigating detective and its Brighton setting mark it out as an important text situated on the cusp between older versions of the crime film and the new permissiveness. Jigsaw's interrogation of the problematic sexual behaviour of two ostensibly middle-class, middle-aged men is therefore particularly interesting, especially when placed within the context of the cultural anxieties about marriage, the increasingly fluid class system of the early 1960s and an emergent youth culture.

Campaigning and Coming of Age in the 1970s

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-120
Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Beauty Pageant ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Exciting Time ◽  
Post War ◽  
Personal Challenges ◽  
Feminist Strategy

The chapter deploys feminist oral histories to explore the WLM’s key demands and campaigns in the 1970s, including the Miss World beauty pageant protest and the Nightcleaners’ campaign. After unpicking romanticised ideas about feminist consciousness-raising, it suggests that established narratives that gloomily recount the collapse of the post-war consensus overlook an exciting time for a WLM energised by campaigns around women’s domestic labour and reproductive rights, epitomised by the National Abortion Campaign. But the NAC’s successes also involved difficult emotions and ambivalence about feminist strategy and identity, analysed especially through the memories of black campaigners Jan McKenley and Gail Lewis, and Kirsten Hearn from Sisters Against Disablement. The chapter concludes with the story of Karen McMinn, coordinator of Women’s Aid Northern Ireland, using her S&A oral history to recall campaigns against domestic violence in the context of civil strife, and the personal challenges involved in keeping the feminist flame alive. 150 words

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document