Lay Catholic Societies in Twentieth Century Britain ed. by Maria Power and Jonathan Bush (review)

Introduction: British Business in the Twentieth Century: What Sort of Decline, What Sort of 'Renaissance'? 1. Strategic Games, Scale, and Efficiency, or Chandler goes to Hollywood 2. Industrial Policy in Twentieth Century Britain 3. Business in the Regions: From 'Old' Districts to 'New' Clusters? 4. Elites, Entrepreneurs, and British Business in the Twentieth Century 5. Invisible Entrepreneurs? Women and Business in Twentieth Century Britain 6. From a Solution to a Problem? Overseas Multinationals in Britain during Economic Decline and Renaissance 7. British Management since 1945: 'Renaissance' and Inertia, Illusions and Realities 8. Not 'Decline and Revival': An Alternative Narrative on British Post-War Productivity 9. Marketing Management in Britain: What Is the Evidence for 'Failure'? 10. British Retail Banking in the Twentieth Century: Decline and Renaissance in Industrial Lending 11. The Decline and Renewal of British Multinational Banking 12. Back to the Future: The Aircraft and IT Industries in Britain since 1945 13. Industrial Research and the Employment of Scientists in British Industry before the 1970s 14. Increasing Value? Modern British Retailing in the Late Twentieth Century 15. Predicting, Providing, Sustaining, Integrating? British Transport Policy since 1945 16. The Film Industry in Twentieth Century Britain: Consumption Patterns, Government Regulation, and Firm Strategy 17. British Sport Transformed: Sport, Business, and the Media since 1960 18. Ethics, Religion, and Business in Twentieth Century Britain

Introduction: Meat, Medicine, and Human Health in the Twentieth Century - David Cantor and Christian Bonah Part I: Meat and Therapeutics 1 Zomine: A Tale of Raw Meat, Tuberculosis, Industry and War in Early Twentieth-Century France - Ilana Lowy 2 Treat with Meat: Protein, Palatability and Pernicious Anaemia in the 1920s-1930s - Susan Lederer 3 How Abattoir 'Biotrash' Connected the Social Worlds of the University Laboratory and the Disassembly Line - Naomi Pfeffer Part II: Meat, Politics, and Culture 4 What's Meatpacking Got to Do with Worker and Community Health? - Donald D Stull and Michael J Broadway 5 Is Refrigerated Meat Healthy? Mexico Encounters the Chicago Meatpacking 'Jungle' c.1910 - Jeffrey M Pilcher 6 Confused Messages: Meat, Civilization and Cancer Education in the Early Twentieth Century - David Cantor 7 What's for Dinner? Science and the Ideology of Meat in Twentieth-Century US Culture - Rima D Apple 8 Vegetarianism, Meat and Life Reform in Early Twentieth-Century Germany and their Fate in the 'Third Reich' - Ulrike Thoms Part III: Meat, Risk and Regulation 9 Mad and Coughing Cows: Bovine Tuberculosis, BSE and Health in Twentieth Century Britain - Keir Waddington 10 Food, Drug and Consumer Regulation: The 'Meat, DES and Cancer' Debates in the United States - Jean-Paul Gaudilliere

This article examines the representation of the medieval past in historical pageants in twentieth-century England. Pageants were an important aspect of popular engagement with the past, and often focused heavily on the medieval period. Different episodes and characters both historical and legendary—Alfred the Great, King John and Robin Hood, for example—featured at different times and in different ways during the twentieth century. Many communities saw their origins as being medieval, and almost all found important stories to tell from this period. However, the emphasis shifted over time, with the lessons of the ‘constitutional Middle Ages’ featuring prominently in Edwardian pageants, whereas by the 1950s elements of the romantic and grotesque were increasingly prominent. Throughout the twentieth century, aspects of civic medievalism were an important feature in pageants, particularly those staged in urban locations, but the style of representation of the medieval period changed over time, partly under the influence of new media—notably the cinema, radio and television. In the second half of the twentieth century, historical pageantry declined significantly, though it never disappeared; and although popular interest in the medieval past was undiminished, it increasingly took different forms.

Reviewed by: Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain John W. Stewart Mathew Thomson . Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. vi + 330 pp. $110.00 (ISBN-10: 0-19-928780-5; ISBN-13: 978-0-19-928780-2). Mathew Thomson has established himself, in a number of groundbreaking and justly praised publications, as one of Britain's leading historians of mental health and mental deficiency. In the work under review he has built upon and expanded his earlier research to produce what he describes as "a study of the shifting character of psychological thought and practice in twentieth-century Britain" (p. 289). As this suggests, his book is not therefore an institutional or intellectual history of psychology, although it has much to say of significance for these fields; rather, it deals with how, and to what extent, psychology permeated both elite and popular culture and thought. This is done, for the most part, through a series of carefully chosen case studies. For example, Thomson discusses the popularity of psychology with the working-class Plebs League in the interwar period. The range of psychological thought recommended to Plebs League readers was eclectic; one reading list, for instance, embraced Freud and Adler, as well as British psychologists such as William McDougall (p. 151). This brings out an important point about this book—namely that, especially but not exclusively at the popular level, twentieth-century Britons took what they wanted from psychological thought without for the most part following one particular school. In turn, this alerts us to one of Thomson's central claims: that the "Whiggish" story of Freudianism progressively gaining hold is, at the very least, in need of qualification. Continuity was as important as change, and in any event, competing psychological theories and practices also influenced British society at various levels and to varying degrees. If continuity was important, so too was the relationship between psychology and social and moral values, some of which were likewise of long-standing significance in British society. The working-class autodidact of the early part of the twentieth century who read psychology did so in part with the aim of self-improvement. In the same period, but dealing with a very different section of society, Thomson shows how elite doctors, and then the medical profession more generally, saw in psychology the possibility of "a return to a more holistic approach within medicine" and thus away from a strictly materialist outlook (p. 196). In a different historical context, and again with a different "audience" in mind, post-1945 psychology had much to say about child rearing and education—although, as is rightly pointed out, this too was a phenomenon with a long pedigree. As will already be evident, this is a work with an extraordinarily impressive range and intellectual command of its materials. Aside from the points noted above, Thomson also, among other things, forces us to rethink the significance or otherwise of the "new" psychology of the early part of the century, and of the actual impact during and after the First World War of "shell-shock." It is, of course, the sign of an outstanding historical work that it leaves the reader wishing for more. For example, the author makes some interesting but too-brief comments about psychology and social work; this is a much underexplored issue, with particular significance attaching to the setting up by the London School of Economics of [End Page 218] its Diploma in Mental Health in the late 1920s. Similarly, there has been a lot of important work recently on the psychologizing of homosexuality, which might have been engaged with.1 But these are minor quibbles. Thomson has produced a book of considerable significance, and one that can be read with profit by historians of medicine, the social sciences, and high and low culture. John W. Stewart Glasgow Caledonian University Footnotes 1. See the references and citations in Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Fifty-seven men of color were sentenced to death by the courts of England and Wales in the twentieth century and were less likely to receive mercy than white contemporaries. Though shocking, the data is perhaps unsurprising considering institutional racism and unequal access to justice widely highlighted by criminologists since the 1970s. We find discourses of racial difference were frequently mobilized tactically in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and Wales: to support arguments for mercy and attempt to save prisoners from the gallows. Scholars have identified historically and culturally contingent narratives traditionally deployed to speak to notions of lesser culpability. These mercy narratives reveal contemporary ideals and attitudes to gender or class. This article is original in identifying strategic mercy narratives told in twentieth-century England and Wales that called on contemporary tropes about defendants' race. The narratives and cases we explore suggest contemporary racism in the criminal justice system of England and Wales has a longer history than previously acknowledged.

In twentieth-century Britain, for the first time in history, it became normal to grow old. The Mass Observation respondents quoted here provide valuable expressions of how individual women perceived and experienced the major changes in the lives of older people over the twentieth century. When state pensions were introduced in Britain in 1908 they were payable at age 70. This was the first time in modern history that the British state had defined old age as such. It was argued that both men and women varied widely in the ages at which they became incapable of earning a regular income and that the pension should be paid at the age of incapacity for regular work rather than at a single universal age. Old age continued to be popularly associated with poverty throughout the twentieth century, but as in all centuries, by no means were all old people poor. Old women were more likely to be poor than old men.

Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic 'first wave' folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a 'conservative modernity', which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a 'second wave' folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums' perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization.

Archives have the potential to change people’s lives. They are created to enable the conduct of business and accountability, but they also support a democratic society’s expectations for transparency and the protection of rights, they underpin citizen’s rights and are the raw material of our history and memory. This paper examines these issues in the context of the historical development of archives and archivists in twentieth century England. The research lays the foundations for understanding how and why the modern archives and records management profession developed in England. This paper will investigate the historical conflict (or is it a continuum?) between archives as culture and as evidence. The story identifies and highlights the contributions made by many fascinating individuals who established archives services and professional practice in England in the twentieth century. They shaped the archive in a very real way, and their individual enthusiasms, interests and understandings set the course of the English archival profession. To a great extent, it was these individuals, rather than government or legislation, that set the boundaries of English archives, they decided what was included (acquired) and what was not (of archival value.) The conclusion will consider the more fundamental questions: what are archives and what are they for, or perhaps, ‘what good are the archives’?

Notes on Contributors

Lay Catholic societies in twentieth century Britain

This article examines the formation of the governing body of women’s cricket in 1926 and its subsequent activities, arguing for a reinsertion of women’s sport into the history of women and the women’s movement in twentieth-century Britain. The centrality of sport to many women’s lives is clearly demonstrated; it is argued that playing cricket was a way to challenge discourses surrounding female frailty, and a way for women to reject traditional models of domesticity, placing their own leisure needs above servicing the needs of their husbands. Overall it is suggested that a detailed examination of women’s sporting lives can disrupt and alter our current understanding of women’s history, revealing new continuities in the ideological development of the women's movement. Including sporting organisations in a broader definition of the women’s movement is therefore crucial for historians, as we seek to make sense of women’s lives across the twentieth century.

This article examines the organisation, nature and content of historical pageants in twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on four pageants at St Albans, Hertfordshire – in 1907, 1948, 1953 and 1968 – it considers the selection of historical episodes that were depicted, the role that pageants played in the life of the community, and the ways in which the relationship between past and present was presented. Pageants functioned as both education and entertainment, and were significant events in the creation of the public image of the city, although they could also provoke local controversy and dissent. They promoted a strongly local sense of identity, and civic pride was perhaps even more important to the post-war pageants than to those staged in the Edwardian period, as communities such as St Albans negotiated a period of rapid development and change in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the large-scale civic pageant that characterised the first half of the twentieth century rapidly declined in the late 1950s and early 1960s, proving less adaptable in the context of the cultural upheavals of the period. Subsequent pageants were on a much smaller scale than those that were staged before the mid-1950s, and adopted a different attitude to the national and local past.

I can still remember my first visit to the Bullring in Birmingham in the latter years of the twentieth century; the endless dark walkways, the disorientating absence of windows or natural light, the almost-unplaceable music, the down-at-heel shops. I have also returned as an adult to the new, shiny, bubble-wrapped Bullring. What I didn’t understand then, and what Wetherell’s book draws out so persuasively, is the way that these evolving urban forms—from shopping precinct to shopping mall—have epitomized, spatialized, and constituted the interlinked shifts in ideas of society, politics, and the individual in twentieth-century Britain. Through examples like this and many more, Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain makes a series of arguments about the relationship between the spatial forms of the built environment and the political forms of twentieth-century Britain. Wetherell’s foundational premise is that Britain’s neoliberal political formation has been characterized by the uneasy interplay between old and new. Here he describes the built environment as a “giant museum, exhibiting the decrepit and shabby remains of prior means of capital accumulation along with obsolete visions of society” (5). Indeed, he argues that neoliberalism should be understood as a type of market fundamentalism layered on top of the ruins of mid-twentieth-century developmental projects. Building on this, Wetherell calls for a more nuanced understanding of British neoliberalism that is located in the things and spaces that make up the landscapes of Britain. Moreover, he foregrounds the way that these new spaces made material the networks between the island of Britain and the world, through finance, spatial forms, and these places’ designers, builders, and inhabitants.

Richard Soloway offers a compelling and authoritative study of relationship of eugenics movement to dramatic decline in birthrate and family size in twentieth-century Britain. Working in a tradition of hereditarian determinism which held fast to premise that like tends to beget like, eugenicists developed and promoted a theory of biosocial engineering through selective reproduction. Soloway shows that appeal of eugenics to middle and upper classes of British society was closely linked to recurring concerns about relentless drop in fertility and rapid spread of birth control practices from 1870s to World War II. Demography and Degeneration considers how differing scientific and pseudoscientific theories of biological inheritance became popularized and enmeshed in prolonged, often contentious national debate about race suicide and the dwindling family. Demographic statistics demonstrated that birthrates were declining among better-educated, most successful classes while they remained high for poorest, least-educated portion of population. For many people steeped in ideas of social Darwinism, eugenicist theories made this decline all more alarming: they feared that falling birthrates among better classes signfied a racial decline and degeneration that might prevent Britain from successfully negotiating myriad competive challenges facing nation in twentieth century. Although organized eugenics movement remained small and elitist throughout most of its history, this study demonstrates how pervasive eugenic assumptions were in middle and upper reaches of British society, at least until World War II. It also traces important role of eugenics in emergence of modern family planning movement and formulation of population policies in interwar years.

Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in 1965. At this time, the way people in Britain perceived and understood the death penalty had changed – it was an issue that had become increasingly controversial, high-profile and fraught with emotion. In order to understand why this was, it is necessary to examine how ordinary people learned about and experienced capital punishment. Drawing on primary research, this book explores the cultural life of the death penalty in Britain in the twentieth century, including an exploration of the role of the popular press and a discussion of portrayals of the death penalty in plays, novels and films. Popular protest against capital punishment and public responses to and understandings of capital cases are also discussed, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of justice. Miscarriages of justice were significant to capital punishment’s increasingly fraught nature in the mid twentieth-century and the book analyses the unsettling power of two such high profile miscarriages of justice. The final chapters consider the continuing relevance of capital punishment in Britain after abolition, including its symbolism and how people negotiate memories of the death penalty. Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain is groundbreaking in its attention to the death penalty and the effect it had on everyday life and it is the only text on this era to place public and popular discourses about, and reactions to, capital punishment at the centre of the analysis. Interdisciplinary in focus and methodology, it will appeal to historians, criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal scholars.