A Lark for the Sake of Their Country

Abstract

A lark for the sake of their country tells the tale of the upper and middle-class ‘volunteers’ in Great Britain's 1926 General Strike. With behaviour derived from their play traditions – the larks, rags, fancy dress parties, and treasure hunts that prevailed at universities and country houses – the volunteers transformed a potential workers’ revolution into a festive public performance of Englishness. This book recreates the cultural context for the volunteers’ actions to explore how volunteers, strikers, and the Government used the strike to define national identity; it also considers how scholars, novelists, playwrights, diarists, museum curators, local examine historians, and even a theme restaurant have continued to recycle the event.Despite scores of books about the strike, there is no other full-length study of the volunteers. Using the methodology and theory of folklore, social anthropology, literary criticism, and social history, this work presents a cultural ethnography of one of modern British history's most significant events. From 1985’87, the author conducted correspondence and oral history interviews with nearly 300 volunteers, strikers, and contemporary observers. Those materials, combined with archival documents and a survey of contemporary media, novels, diaries, plays, memoirs, histories, and exhibitions, provided the basis for exploring the traditional expressive culture of the British upper classes.This study will appeal to aficianodos of British social and cultural history, folklore, and popular culture as well as to undergraduate and graduate classes in British studies, modern labour history, and social anthropology as well as those on collective memory, history making and identity.