Voluntary action in the ‘welfare state’: the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child

As state involvement in the provision of social and medical welfare grew during the twentieth-century, it was often seen as antagonistic to the work of voluntary associations which had pioneered many different types of welfare provision. Pat Thane argues that such assumptions are a false dichotomy and develops a case study of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (NCUM), founded in 1918, as a means through which to assess the changing landscape of twentieth-century social welfare and the relationship between voluntary action and public sector welfare. The work of organizations like the NCUM actually intensified with the growth of state welfare provision from the inter-war years onwards; a pattern which was duplicated across the welfare sector more generally Thane contests political arguments that the ‘big society’ should replace the supposed ‘stranglehold’ of state welfare by highlighting the extent to which the historical relationship between voluntary associations and the state has actually been creative and mutually sustaining.

Daddy, what did you find to laugh about in the Great War? The cotton cartoons of Sam Fitton

A source of historical evidence whose value has attracted greater attention in recent years is the newspaper cartoon, which Alan Fowler draws on in his essay on the Lancashire writer and comic performer, Sam Fitton, a popular cartoonist on the Cotton Factory Times, the weekly newspaper of Lancashire cotton operatives, published between 1907 and 1917. Fitton’s work has been largely overlooked by historians and Fowler makes a valuable contribution to the biographical scholarship on British cartoonists, using Fitton’s cartoons on the home front to explore a neglected aspect of World War One history, the conditions and preoccupations of Lancashire cotton workers. Fowler places these within the broader context of the Lancashire cotton industry with which Fitton, himself a cotton worker, was very familiar, and draws attention to the richness of these cartoons as a regional source whose evocation of a sense of belonging and place among its Lancashire readers was very different from the civic pride exemplified by the local history societies and public statuary of the Victorian period, on which Kidd and Wyke focus.

The continuing tradition of civic pride: municipal culture in post-war Manchester

It has been argued that civic pride declined after its heyday in the Victorian period but Peter Shapely contests this view, illustrating how in Manchester, a combination of civic pride, social reform and policy rooted in the Victorian period were re-defined over the twentieth-century, albeit retaining a ‘boosterish’ emphasis on the city’s image and reputation, particularly in the 1960s. Postwar planners aimed to construct their own version of a modern cityscape in Manchester delivered through a programme of ambitious building projects whose civic ambitions would have been familiar to their Victorian predecessors. When these aspirations faltered during Manchester’s industrial decline between the mid-1970s and late-1980s, civic pride was maintained by the ambitions of the local press, politicians and prominent figures and eventually harnessed to new regeneration projects, as Manchester’s image was re-invented through high-profile re-development schemes and festivals based on sport and the arts. There were, as Shapely argues, continuities in how governing elites and institutions defined the contours of Manchester’s civic pride and reputation, a cultural hegemony that persisted across two centuries. This was, however, distinct from the sense of civic pride which many ordinary local residents experienced with different kinds of local attachment and identity.

Administrative practices and the ‘middling sort’: place, practice and identity in eighteenth-century rural England

Alistair Mutch examines administrative practices in eighteenth century rural parishes, using the evidence of churchwardens’ records from the Deanery of Bingham, Nottinghamshire, complemented by details of parish life from contemporary diaries. Churchwardens were part of the ‘middling sort’, elite parish office holders whose freedom in devising their own administrative practices meant patterns of accountability often varied considerably between parishes. These practices depended much on the personal character of the office holder, whose degree of local autonomy reproduced a very ‘Anglican form of authority’. Churchwardens’ stewardship of money and conduct of accounts meetings had a personal, sociable dimension which contrasted with the rigorous, disciplined ‘forms of accountability’ associated with kirk sessions in Scotland during the same period, and these distinctive patterns of administrative order deserve greater attention, because of their potential to offer new perspectives on emerging notions of national identity and difference.

Memorial mania: remembering and forgetting Sir Robert Peel

The transformations which took place in the urban environment during the Victorian period gave the public space of towns and cities new meanings, and Terry Wyke’s essay on Sir Robert Peel, examines how political lives and reputations were shaped by the commemorative culture of public portrait statues and busts. Peel's death in 1850 and his subsequent memorializatiom marked the start of a significant trend in public life, expressed in the commissioning of outdoor portrait statues to celebrate prominent local and national figures. Peel's image, 'forged' by the contemporary press, was absorbed by a broader Liberal bourgeois narrative in cities like Manchester, as a public statement of the reputation and achievements of the Anti-Corn Law League, with which Peel was so strongly associated. Such portraiture, replete with political symbolism, played an important part in defining a new civic landscape in the Victorian period, a material narrative of political life that had been largely forgotten by the second half of the twentieth century, although it remains a rich source of evidence deserving of greater attention.

Local history enthusiasts: English county historical societies since the nineteenth century

Alan Kidd explores the cultural sphere of amateur local historians and the associational culture of the local historical societies, from their origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries to their evolution in the twentieth. The county historical societies founded in the nineteenth-century were expressions of urban bourgeois culture and their early success owed much to that symbol of modernity, the world’s first national railway network, however, the societies exemplified the persisting social deference of ‘provincial cultural life’ expressed in the very survival of the ancient county identities. The work of nineteenth-century county historical societies contributed to an imagined notion of Englishness whose rural associations was a steadying counterpoint to a rapidly developing urban reality. The shadow of ‘amateurism’ haunted the historical societies as History developed as a university discipline, although a shift in attitudes towards the subject of local history came in the second half of the twentieth-century, chiefly in the form of ‘history from below’, exemplified by the History Workshop movement and the subsequent concepts of community history and public history.

‘Hoping you’ll give me some guidance about this thing called money’: the Daily Mirror and personal finance, c. 1960–81

In the 1960s the Daily Mirror ran a weekly feature offering financial and investment advice about stocks and shares and it dealt with thousands of letters a year about financial matters from readers who found its advice more accessible and less intimidating than speaking to financial professionals. The social optimism of the sixties dissipated in the 1970s, however, as the economic situation deteriorated and the Daily Mirror’s financial advice had to adapt to a climate in which its own circulation was declining and as its core readership started to age the column became more conservative, dealing with queries from older readers and worries about unemployment, and focusing more on ‘mitigating’ the effects of inflation and redundancy payments. Porter argues that the Daily Mirror had, in fact, misinterpreted its readers’ interest in ‘popular capitalism’ during full employment and rising living standards in the 1960s, when its advocacy of financial investment reflected contemporary beliefs that the values and aspirations of the working-class were changing, with greater opportunities to borrow, save and spend. As he points out, its financial journalists were forced over time to adapt to more pragmatic queries about family budgeting and personal savings rather than focusing on larger investments.

Fifty years ahead of its time? The provident dispensaries movement in Manchester, 1871–85

Martin Hewitt’s chapter on the history of the provident dispensary movement, initiated in the 1870s by the social reformer, Dr John Watts asks why provident dispensaries, unlike the Hospital Funds movement, have been largely neglected in the scholarship of medical philanthropy although, as Hewitt argues, those in Manchester were central to national debates over hospital reform and served as a model for similar initiatives in other parts of the country. The establishment of provident dispensaries in the city encapsulated many of the challenges which impeded the development of medical provision for the working-classes, as in the tensions which Hewitt illustrates in relation to the professional status and expectations of medical men, concerned about the movement’s threats to their fees and status. Watt’s scheme of provident dispensaries, which aimed to promote ‘a general scheme of medical insurance’, was ahead of its time, symptomatic, Hewitt argues, of the pitfalls which faced those committed to the establishment of a comprehensive system of healthcare in the late-Victorian period.

Introduction

The editors introduce the volume and the chapter is in two parts. The first part summarises the themes of the book and the arguments of each of the essays and the second part is an appreciation of the life and work of the person in his whose honour the essays have been written.

From ‘marriage bureau’ to ‘points of view’: changing patterns of advice in teenage magazines: Mirabelle, 1956–77

Melanie Tebbutt’s essay traces some of the changes which transformed working-class culture after the Second World War through an analysis of the personal advice pages of teenage magazines, an important expression of girls’ culture between the mid-1950s and late-1970s. Tebbutt takes as her subject Mirabelle magazine, widely read by girls in this period, although its popularity has been largely over-shadowed by the most popular teenage magazine of the time, which was Jackie. Advice pages in teenage magazines from the 1950s and 1960s have received less attention that those of the later decades of the twentieth-century and Tebbutt traces the changes which took place in queries and answers, from the time of Mirabelle’s publication, in 1956, when its advice column was identified with a marriage bureau in central Manchester, to ceasing production in 1977, by which time discussion of sexual matters, including pregnancy outside marriage, had become more open. Magazines aimed at the teenage market were an important source of sexual information for young people and this essay offers a nuanced analysis of Mirabelle’s advice pages which suggests there is considerable scope for comparative studies.