Early Twentieth-century Britain Research Articles

Corporatism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain: Three Alternatives for a Post-Liberal Order

This article engages with the most recent literature on the global circulation of corporatist projects, discussing three reform schemes elaborated in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century – G.D.H. Cole's guild socialism, Dudley Docker's technocratic business parliament and Harold Macmillan's conservative industrial self-government. Overcoming the often too rigid equivalences between corporatism and fascism, this article seeks to ascertain to what extent and with what nuances corporatist ideas circulated among non-fascist political circles in Britain. It is argued that the schemes analysed shared a similar corporatist matrix, which nonetheless served as the core idea of different political strategies. In the conclusions, it is claimed that these dissimilarities are consequential to the degree of adherence to the principles of capitalism, i.e. the profit-earning motive and the private ownership of the means of production, as well as to the democratic level of the institutions proposed.

Physical Culture Supplements in Early Twentieth Century Britain

Physical Culture Supplements in Early Twentieth Century Britain

The Unsung Activists: UK Shareholder Investigation Committees, 1888–1940

As companies became larger and shareholders more numerous in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, the conventional wisdom is that the free-rider problem inhibited active shareholder participation. Discontented shareholders could sell in the market, but it was long before the takeover bid mechanism facilitated the removal of underperforming incumbent boards. We show, using a sample of fifty cases in the period from 1888 to 1940, that UK shareholders overcame the free-rider problem by using committees of investigation on a sufficiently large scale to present a credible threat to board malfeasance. Although there was more to corporate performance than corporate governance, this aspect of good governance plausibly contributed to London's precocity in divorcing ownership from control in domestic companies up to World War II.

“Accustomed to Female Domination”: Women, Mass Media, and Animal Intimacy in Interwar Britain

This essay analyzes four visual sources that shed light on the relationship between gender and animal intimacy in interwar Britain. They are all photographs that appeared in print media, and all relate to the production of wildlife films. The first is a montage of six photographs showing a woman’s friendship with the “strange savage beasts” of the London Zoo; the second is an advertisement for a popular remedy; the third shows a director shooting a zoo film; the fourth contains shots from a documentary made in 1938. The essay focuses on three women—Gladys Callow, Mary Field, and Evelyn Spice—all former schoolteachers who became involved in the production of zoo films. By analyzing this series of images, connections between contemporary ideas about gender, animal tameness, and colonial domination are established, reflecting shifts in the depiction of animal intimacy in early twentieth-century Britain.

Editorial: New Editors

With this issue, seven new editors join the collective of History Workshop Journal, significantly enlarging our expertise. We’re delighted to welcome them: Meleisa Ono-George (Queens College, Oxford) is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is currently conducting research for a book that focuses on the lives of several Black women in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. She has also begun to develop her next project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the politics of historical production. Kennetta Hammond Perry is Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, DeMontfort University. Her research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Black women’s history, archives of Black Europe, and anti-racist movements for citizenship, recognition and social justice throughout the African Diaspora. She has published widely, including a book-length study on Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain following the Second World War titled London is the Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2016). Currently, she is researching histories of state-sanctioned racial violence and the relationship between the decline of the welfare state and the expansion of the carceral state in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.

Vision Testing in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain: Opticians, Medical Practitioners and the Battle for Professional Authority.

SummaryIn the 1890s, opticians were reforming their practice against a body of medical practitioners who were increasingly attempting to specialise in, and monopolise, vision testing and spectacle dispensing. This article explores how and why vision testing became a subject of debate and how opticians were able to successfully set out their claims to professional authority in the face of medical competition. It argues that opticians created a scientific rhetoric distinctive from medical training by combining optics and anatomy. In response, medical practitioners attempted to consolidate the medicalisation of an area of the body through claiming completely new, and potentially unfounded, areas of expertise and medical jurisdiction. A study of the optician’s role in the 1890s demonstrates the broader influence of fringe professions, commercial marketing and the public’s receptiveness to the construction of expertise in enabling but ultimately inhibiting the medicalisation process, an outcome that medical practitioners had to grudgingly accept.

Revisiting the playground: Charles Wicksteed, play equipment and public spaces for children in early twentieth-century Britain

AbstractThis article offers the first detailed history of the children's playground in Britain in the early twentieth century. Despite being a common feature of towns and cities, the playground has rarely been examined by historians. In response, the article charts how changing conceptions of childhood, alternative visions of the city, technological innovation and shifting ideas about health and exercise shaped both the imagined function and material form of the playground ideal. Making visible the historical assumptions hidden in playground swings and slides helps to contextualize both existing scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century adventure playground and present-day efforts to create more equitable urban environments.

Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2020.

Between 1899 and 1907, the medium Rosalie Thompson-giving voice to her dead daughter, Nelly-participated in a number of experimental seances with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which were formative in the development of the society's theories of telepathy, personality and survival. Using the extensive séance notes taken by the researchers, and the range of published materials related to the case, this article situates psychical research as an intimate practice; its scientific method relied on the production of intimate evidence by the medium, including the intimacy of touch; its leading proponents were neighbours, friends and relatives, who began communicating via Thompson once key members began to die from 1900. By keeping the focus on the life of Thompson herself, however, the article seeks to use the 'small history' of Mrs Thompson to tell a bigger and more complex story about intimacy in early twentieth-century Britain.

An ‘epidemic of shoplifting’? Working-class women, shop theft and Manchester’s new retail culture, 1918–1939

ABSTRACT The problem of the working-class female shoplifter emerged prominently within press and police discourse in interwar Manchester following a dramatic shift in the city’s retail culture. Providing the first non-metropolitan study of shoplifting in early twentieth-century Britain, this research identifies how the new retail culture was blamed for attracting shoplifters to Manchester. It addresses depictions of shoplifters from the late 1920s in relation to narratives about young working-class women’s increased autonomy, and shows how in the 1930s the city centre was depicted as vulnerable to the geographical mobility and misbehaviour of older, married working-class women, in light of access to the motorcar and advances in public transport. A focus on their illicit access to consumer culture, rather than concerns about sexuality, moves away from a portrayal of working-class women as vulnerable and heavily policed in cities and instead suggests that interwar shoplifting discourse reflected a sense that poorer women had greater freedoms in the post-1918 city. The role of shopping culture helped working-class women gain increased visibility in the urban sphere in similar ways to those experienced by more affluent women in the pre-1918 cityscape.

Blinded by science? Constructing truth and authority in early twentieth-century Virol advertisements

ABSTRACT This paper conducts a case study of the marketing of Virol – a malt extract preparation that was popular in early twentieth-century Britain – using advertisements from British newspapers. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, it explores how marketers drew upon linguistic/semiotic resources to embed Virol in discourses of scientific knowledge and how these discourses were made to appear true. Through targeted marketing campaigns, Virol established consumer bases framed around three health concerns: malnutrition, constipation and anxiety. Using testimonies, buzzwords, photographs and infographics, Virol created an illusion of scientific rationality, yet the studies or authority figures behind their findings were never explicitly specified, leaving consumers to make assumptions about the product’s benefits using their own limited understandings. As women were the primary household shoppers, ‘scientific motherhood’ (and ‘wifehood’) was also drawn upon, producing a dichotomy that framed women as responsible for their families’ health, yet incapable of this responsibility without expert intervention.

Responses to traveling Indian ayahs in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement for both colonizers and colonized across the world. This study focuses on Indian traveling ayahs (female servants and nannies) who traveled between India and Britain, but often underwent periods of destitution in Britain before returning to India. Using case studies of destitute ayahs, this essay investigates how the British state, British persons and British institutions responded to the destitution of imperial subjects from overseas in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study examines the social, legal and economic power dynamics underlying these responses, revealing a combination of confrontation and collaboration between migrant colonized subjects and those engaging with them in responding to contradictory imperial polices. The article highlights the agency of a neglected group of women who, in asserting their contribution to the Empire and their rights as imperial subjects, refused to accept a second-class form of Britishness.

Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 by Elly McCausland

Reviewed by: Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980 by Elly McCausland Ashley Johnson (bio) Elly McCausland. Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980. D. S. Brewer, 2019. In her study, Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child 1862–1980, Elly McCausland tracks King Arthur’s location at what she deems “the crossing places” that inspire adaptations of Thomas Malory’s influential Morte Darthur. In doing so, she maps both Arthur’s and Malory’s places in the development of Arthuriana for children (189). As McCausland makes clear, she is not so much interested in the children who read Malory’s Morte and its adaptations as she is in the authors who invent the child-reader for those texts. Her work, which surveys an impressive number of narratives by multiple authors, fills a substantial gap by addressing the long overlooked relationship between Arthuriana and children’s literature. McCausland begins by outlining the significance of Malory’s Morte, arguing that as a case study it suggests that “shifting conceptions of the child—as bold and adventurous, socially fragile, magical and innocent—actually manifested themselves in texts that either attempted to engage with these children or were shaped by a profound authorial interest in the realm of childness. It reveals the complexities of interacting with the child as a writer, parent, teacher, or through memory of one’s own childhood” (6–7). McCausland then breaks her discussion into five chapters and a conclusion, each of which investigates either a specific selection of texts and their corresponding illustrations or an author who has either revised or reimagined Malory’s tale. Her first chapter focuses on abridgements of Malory’s narrative, and the subsequent chapters examine adaptations. Chapter 1 surveys the works of J. T. Knowles, Sidney Lanier, Charles Henry Hanson, and Margaret Vere Farrington. Here, McCausland highlights the ways that authors emphasized the enduring, moral themes of knighthood and adventure, and expanded Malory’s definition of chivalric masculinity to involve both the physical and the moral. Significant here is McCausland’s contention that these abridgements rely on Tennyson’s Idylls. Using Tennyson as a model, the authors hoped to craft a narrative appropriate for young readers by following Tennyson’s strategy of making the Morte ethically suitable for Victorian audiences. Thus, ultimately, these texts were created as attempts to popularize and moralize the Morte. Chapter 2 continues this discussion through an analysis of the works of American author Howard Pyle (1903–10) and British author Henry Gilbert (1911). Pyle and Gilbert reinterpret [End Page 124] Malory’s knightly adventures as “an example to children, specifically boys, by reformulating [Morte’s] martial adventures to emphasise a series of social and moral qualities linked to the development of idealised manhood” (57). These authors use their narratives to consider the value of adventurous manhood in early twentieth-century Britain and America by positioning the knights as youthful. Significant here is a discussion of the late Victorian and early twentieth-century trend to offer inspirational, didactic stories that would instill manly courage in the hearts of boys, suggesting that boys could be capable of heroic deeds. In line with this, McCausland juxtaposes the rise of the Boy Scout movement with the dissemination of these texts, arguing that these mechanisms worked together to offer boys a way to indulge in fantasies of risk-taking of knighthood while remaining socially responsible in their everyday lives. McCausland returns to a survey of multiple texts in chapter 4 with a review of five adaptations that demonstrate the versatility of the Arthurian narrative. These works by Phyllis Briggs, Roger Lancelyn Green, Alice Hadfield, Antonia Fraser, and Barbara Leonie Picard are obviously influenced by Malory’s Morte, but they alter his materials drastically by embellishing the narrative extensively, changing or deleting scenes, and making the narrative relatable to mid-twentieth century readers. Here, Mc-Causland assesses the strategies shaping these adaptations, from magic and mysticism, and from spirituality and psychological drama, to reveal “unstable constructions of childhood and the child reader” (117). In addition to an extensive survey of Malory-inspired texts, McCausland focuses on the lives and writings of T. H. White...

Maria StepanovaIn Memory of Memory by Sasha Dugdale

0 to transcribe his life in a single meaningful, coherent work. As he probes the intersection of racism, nationalism, and war, Magnus dips in and out of history and fiction to reveal telling philosophical lessons about the tendency of man to make black and white the cultures of the world, when in reality we are all pieces of the same game. Ellie Simon Norman, Oklahoma Maria Stepanova In Memory of Memory Trans. Sasha Dugdale. London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 500 pages. THE LITERATURE OF MEMORY often explores what consciousness is stored in and speaks from objects. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu uses the (now legendary) madeleine cakes of Marcel’s aunt Léonie to access hidden memories from Combray; Péter Nádas’s A Book of Memories finds a key motif in the colored stained-glass windows of Berlin and Budapest apartment buildings and the way in which they filter the light coming in. Between these two novels (1913 and 1986, respectively) spans the fiction of recollection of the twentieth century. The poet Maria Stepanova’s first long book, In Memory of Memory, is clearly in love with this tradition, while it also mourns its irrevocable loss: in the present century, the connections between memory and object, meaning and world, and mind and body have become obscured. For Stepanova, objects appear “just as they were”; the italics are original here, and the phrase is significant, as it chimes with a leading motif in contemporary political thought: could-have-been-different / justas -it-is denotes an ontological modality that lingers at the cusps of sovereign power, together with a promise of emancipation. Indeed, objects, as they appear to the private archaeologist Stepanova, do not arrive together with their proper meanings and histories; they emerge in excess of narrative . They are just things, although things that communicate, in an obscure or even a negative way, the history of her family to the writer. It is this communication that must be carefully unpacked and deconstructed . In the same way and for this very reason, Stepanova’s writing presents itself as more clearly of a learned or scholarly character: it engages explicitly with Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and other writers interested in photography and history. pology across the whole country, and the department at Oxford had only began to take shape. Eventually, a troika of male professors from varied backgrounds , “the triumvirate,” ended up leading the department. None of these three professors had done fieldwork. And the fact that all of Larson’s women did go on to work in the field was, for some, due to the increase of its importance but, for all, born out of their longing to “travel far away.” Fieldwork was an escape “from the strictures of English society” and offered a temporary freedom that was lost again, once they came back. They had changed, but their expected role in English society had not. This dichotomy between who they were and who they were allowed to be brought tragedy for all of their lives, albeit to varied degrees. Between the two world wars, anthropology ’s center of authority shifted away from Oxford and an aging triumvirate to Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. Today, Malinowski is referred to as the “father of social anthropology,” having introduced a strong focus on fieldwork and taught a generation of anthropologists that went on to practice and teach around the world. Malinowski was Polish, like Czaplicka. They were friends born in the same year and had come to England at similar times. However, the tragically opposite fates of these two brilliant and driven people point to the divergent opportunities between men and women in early twentieth-century Britain. A hundred years after her heroines met at Oxford, Larson found that these first five female anthropologists “remained peripheral to the histories . . . of great men” and set out to write a book that was to change that. With Undreamed Shores, Larson has not only made a superb effort in achieving this but has also given us, man or woman, inspiring examples of unusual bravery and strength in fighting all odds and daring to follow our dreams. Undreamed Shores...

Women’s Institutes drama groups and Shakespeare in early twentieth-century England, 1919–1939

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of Shakespeare by the Women’s Institutes drama groups during the interwar period in rural England. The WIs used amateur theatre to emphasise women’s social and cultural value as part of their broader effort to revitalise the countryside. The article asserts that the broad nature of the WIs and its local variances meant that the drama groups not only appealed to a diverse group of women, but their performances also had wide public appeal. Additionally, the malleability and recognisability of Shakespeare’s plays and characters could equally serve either a conservative or progressive ideology, which complicates efforts by historians to fit the drama groups into a feminist paradigm. In order to gauge how these performances—and their messages—were received, the article draws upon newspapers and magazines in conjunction with official records.

The geography of maternal mortality in early twentieth century England and Wales

Avant son déclin majeur dans les années 1930, l’une des caractéristiques les plus frappantes de la mortalité maternelle en Angleterre et au pays de Galles était sa répartition géographique, avec des taux de décès pour 10 000 naissances beaucoup plus élevés dans le Nord et l’Ouest du pays que dans le Sud et l’Est. Les facteurs qui sous-tendent ce schéma n’ont jamais été systématiquement explorés; cet article propose des analyses cartographiques et des régressions à partir des données disponibles pour les comtés et les county boroughs affin d’étudier les impacts de la disponibilité en sages-femmes formées et non formées, et en médecins, de l’infection dans les zones urbaines et industrielles, de la mortalité générale et des problèmes d’enregistrement sur la géographie de la mortalité maternelle. Il apparaît que la structure industrielle, la mortalité générale ainsi que l’offre et la formation de sages-femmes étaient des variables explicatives importantes. L’article suggère également que des variations plus fines dans les services des sages-femmes ainsi que des différences locales dans la qualité de l’enregistrement des causes de décès pourraient aussi avoir affecté le modèle régional.

Синтаксические эмфатические конструкции в преподавании иностранных языков

The article considers the use of syntactic emphatic constructions that become a matter of rising interest not only for the science fiction translators, but also for the teachers of foreign languages and the methodologists. Special attention is paid to the communicative method of teaching, since this method has accumulated the greatest experience in introducing fiction into the field of teaching foreign languages. There has been analyzed the descriptive-analytical method which makes it possible to process the selected lexical material, and the classification method which allows determining the specifics of phenomena and their properties. The material for the study was a series of satirical novels by P. G. Wodehouse, whose characters are a British aristocrat Worcester and his servant Jeeves. In addition to the wide range of stylistic tools used in the novels the author described many realities of early twentieth-century Britain that can be used as a basis for linguoculturological study. There have been analyzed the syntactic emphatic constructions and their main models based on the classification of L. A. Sokolova, E. P. Trofimova and N. A. Kalevich and the examples from the novel. It has been inferred that using fiction literature at the lessons of foreign languages is promising and recommended for further study by specialists in the field of teaching foreign languages. The results of the study can be used in the students’ research works when writing essays, final qualifying papers, preparing creative projects in linguistics and stylistics of English language, the theory and practice of translation

Raman Spectroscopic Analysis of an Early 20th Century English Painted Organ Case by Temple Moore

An organ case from Lincoln, England, designed by the architect Temple Moore in 1907 was examined during conservation work using Raman spectroscopy in order to analyze the decorative paint composition. Samples from the six principal colours were extracted and examined using a Bruker Senterra R200-L spectrometer. The results are the first known formal analysis of a painted scheme by this architect, and they reveal a mixture of commonly used pigments for the period and the unexpected use of simpler, earth pigments, along with an unusual admixture in the red, along with an organic additive. The findings are of importance to both the conservation of Temple Moore’s artwork, in understanding the experimentation used in early twentieth-century England, and in furthering our knowledge of ecclesiastical decorative artwork of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

'She Used to Doctor Us up Herself': Patent Medicines, Mothers, and Expertise in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.

This article provides much-needed new insights into how patent medicines could enhance maternal power outside of clinical environments in the early twentieth century. While historians have considered the maternal management of domestic health, the role patent medicine products played in this complex equation of authority and expertise has yet to be the subject of sustained historical analysis. Using oral history archives, memoirs, social commentary, and advertisements, this article demonstrates how the expertise that mothers possessed was multifaceted, with powerful spatial, temporal, and even commercial connotations. This influence was especially significant at a time when clinical environments were still largely dominated by men, when the home was increasingly invaded by experts and expertise, and when dependants of wage earners were not covered by welfare provisions such as the 1911 National Insurance Act.

Proposals to Move the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, 1836–1944

In 1939, the British Admiralty agreed to move the Royal Observatory from Greenwich to a better site away from London. The removal was postponed due to the Second World War, and the observatory’s re-establishment at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex in the 1940s and 1950s was further delayed by post-war economic difficulties. This paper examines several proposals to remove the observatory that were put forward over a period spanning slightly more than a century before 1939 and asks why none of these were taken up. I argue that the lateness of the move was due partly to astronomers’ fears that the observatory would lose its prestige if moved away from the famous Greenwich meridian and also to certain cultural aspects of professional astronomy in early twentieth-century Britain.

Blending Public and Private: British Municipal Trading c. 1889-1975

Municipal trading was the dominant delivery form for transport and utility services in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain and saw local authorities operate these services on a profit- making basis. This paper uses historical evidence and the ideas of contemporary theorists of municipal trading to demonstrate how these bodies formatively brought hybridity into the public sector, using blended public, corporate and market institutional orders. It demonstrates that in order to gain institutional legitimacy for municipal trading local authorities had to fall back on antecedents in the transport and infrastructure industries, notably in the turnpike trusts, canal and railway industries.