Abstract
We draw upon a ‘small history’ of one family to throw light on lived experience of welfare in the past, and consider how it may provide some glimpses into what Britain’s current economy of welfare trajectory could mean, where the state welfare safety net has holes and an ad hoc charitable safety net is being constructed beneath them. Using archived case notes from the Charity Organisation Society across the interwar period to the comprehensive welfare state, we discuss one family’s negotiation of poverty and the fragmented economy of welfare involving nascent state provision and a safety net of myriad charitable bodies, and the need to be judged as respectable and worthy. While lived experience of inequalities of assessment criteria, provision and distribution provide some indication for the potential trajectory of contemporary welfare in Britain, towards fragmented localised settlements, the small history also reveals a muted story of alternatives and reliability.
Highlights
Historical case studies of social policy can hold important insights for the present and what yet may come (Green 2016; Newstadt and May 1986)
We draw upon a ‘small history’ of one family to consider how lived experience of welfare in Britain in the past may provide us with some indications of what the current economy of welfare trajectory might mean where the British state welfare safety net has so many holes that an ad hoc charitable safety net is being constructed beneath them
The small history that we present here is centred on and reconstructed from a series of episodes recorded in an archived case history file of the Peck family concerning their engagement with aspects of the localised economy of welfare provision from 1928 to 1950
Summary
Historical case studies of social policy can hold important insights for the present and what yet may come (Green 2016; Newstadt and May 1986). Our presentation of the Peck case interweaves the fortunes of one family living in precarious circumstances with moments of major shifts in developments of the British welfare state and the nature of charitable provision that were occurring at the time It touches on aspects of living in poverty that are recurrent, resonating with contemporary conditions of deprivation (Thane 2019), and how a state of precarity is a well-worn feature of capitalist societies rather than a new condition of contemporary neo-liberalism (Kasmir 2018; King and Tomkins 2003). We consider the playing out of social policy processes in the vagaries of the Peck’s lived experience of poverty and negotiation of the localised charitable landscape and front line particularised charitable agencies from which they seek relief, while in our conclusion, we draw out potential indications of the future of Britain’s current economy of welfare trajectory. Britain, where myriad local and charitable and mutual-aid bodies largely played a separate role and met needs distinct from nascent welfare state provision, the advent of the post-war comprehensive welfare state and retreat of charities could rupture a material and social support system, leaving a family adrift
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