Recent British History Research Articles

Changing Britain through the frame of snooker

This paper considers snooker’s rise to popularity, and its relative decline, through the frame of recent British social history. The paper situates an ostensible decline in snooker spectatorship and a demonstrable decline in participation across the UK, against a backdrop of shifts in economic activity, class structure, cultures of masculinity and urban space. Drawing on theories of gender, class, subculture, media and critical urbanism, the paper argues that a sociological frame lends a lot to understanding snooker in the UK. At the same time, it argues that the frame of snooker might also lend a lot to a sociological understanding of industrial, and later, post-industrial Britain.

“Hopeful feeling[s]:” Utopian Shakespeares and the 2021 Reopening of British Theatres

This article focuses on a specific moment in recent British theatre history: the late spring of 2021 when theatres reopened after a prolonged period of closure that had been enforced during the first waves of the Coronavirus pandemic. It considers The HandleBards’ production of Romeo and Juliet (performed at York’s Theatre Royal) and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of that unusual time. The productions, which both used bright colours and irreverent approaches to create festive atmospheres, had a shared joyful aesthetic which encouraged me to think more deeply about what audiences wanted—and needed—from post-lockdown theatre. In this article, I suggest that these vibrant Shakespeares, when presented in the immediate aftermath of the first waves of Covid, functioned as cathartic utopian performatives. They offered audiences uncomplicated joy and “a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like” after Coronavirus (Dolan 2005, p. 5). They “let audiences experience a processual, momentary feeling of affinity” and encouraged them to “imagine, together, the affective potential of a future in which this rich feeling of warmth, even of love, could be experienced regularly and effectively outside the theatre” (Dolan, p. 14). Utopian performatives are characterised by their transience and, inevitably, the simple joy of these Shakespeares was fleeting. Both venues have since hosted visually and thematically darker productions that have used Shakespeare to explore important social and political issues. Indeed, the HandleBards’ Romeo and Juliet and The Globe’s Midsummer are productions which might, in other circumstances, have been dismissed as simplistic. However, I suggest that these productions offered real hope for the future in the wake of crisis and demonstrate the importance of theatre in challenging times.

Popular imaginative geographies and Brexit: Evidence from Mass Observation

The EU Referendum of 2016 was one of the most significant events in recent British political history. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the referendum through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it. This study complements existing research where such understandings have been inferred from citizens’ demographic characteristics, the characteristics of their localities/regions, or elite discourses. It builds on existing research where a more direct engagement with citizens’ understandings has been achieved through interviews or focus groups, allowing the content of understandings to be thickly described. To these latter studies, this paper makes three main contributions. First, it focuses on popular imaginative geographies, which are conceptualised drawing on literatures in Geography and Political Science as fast‐thinking heuristics. Second, it brings new evidence to the conversation in the form of volunteer writing for Mass Observation. Third, the focus is on the content of popular imaginative geographies, but also how and why such geographies were used by voters in the referendum. The main findings include that many Leave supporters imagined Britain as an island – either a once great military and imperial power, an island separate from Europe, needing freedom from Europe to engage in the wider world; or a small island, a full container, close to the rest of Europe and vulnerable to mobilities across Europe’s borders. By contrast, many Remain supporters imagined Britain as post‐imperial, small, vulnerable, and under threat of isolation from Europe and exposure to a chaotic, uncertain, dangerous world. Both groups engaged with the referendum through such popular imaginative geographies because the referendum presented voters with a difficult task, the campaigns provided few trustworthy facts, and voters therefore had to rely on cognitive shortcuts, including popular imaginative geographies.

Brexit and the British Constitution: Reflections on the Last Three years and the Next Fifty

AbstractThe decision to leave the EU provoked the biggest constitutional crisis of recent British history. The referendum—a device for circumventing the parliamentary process—was followed by conflict between a minority government and a majority of MPs unwilling to leave the EU without satisfactory alternative arrangements. The courts, drawn into this conflict, upheld conventions that sustain the authority of Parliament and restrain the despotic power of ministers. The reaction of members of the current government was to take disreputable and anti‐democratic positions against both the Speaker of the House of Commons and the courts. They now have a sufficient majority in Parliament to resume adherence to constitutional conventions and restore a political culture of debate and tolerance, but they show little sign of doing so, and there is a risk that they will do irreparable damage to the political culture that underpins democracy.

The uses of film and visual sources in labour history

Tão logo foi inventada em fins do século XIX, a tecnologia fílmica foi usada por produtores de para registrar, documentar e representar vidas operárias locais. Os filmes eram tipicamente curtos, silenciosos e monocromáticos. Eles foram produzidos e financiados por diferentes pessoas para diferentes propósitos, incluindo negócios de empresários para promover suas empresas, bem como artistas que cobravam dos retratados para que pagassem para assistir ao espetáculo deles e de seus amigos na tela. Os filmes mostravam uma variedade de configurações, incluindo feiras tradicionais e os primeiros cinemas. Este artigo analisa uma seleção de filmes apresentando uma variedade de trabalhadores britânicos no início do século XX, compilados como parte de uma recente série de história da TV britânica para a qual eu contribuí – Edwardian Britain in Colour (Canal 5). Os filmes originais foram restaurados e coloridos de modo a trazê-los à vida para uma nova audiência. O artigo explora as complexidades da captura de trabalhadores e locais de trabalho no filme e sugere como historiadores do trabalho na Grã-Bretanha, no Brasil e alhures podem usar esses filmes e outros materiais visuais como fontes valiosas.

The Politics of Human Rights

The Politics of Human Rights

Educational attainment and the Brexit vote

The Brexit vote is the most significant political event in recent British history. We present bivariate choropleth maps comparing the Leave vote share with age-adjusted secondary educational attainment. This provides an immediate visual representation of the spatial and bivariate correlations between these variables, as well as their geographical distribution. Only 12 of the 85 local authorities that voted Remain had lower than expected age-adjusted educational attainment; only 10 of the 95 local authorities in which the Leave vote share exceeded 60% had higher than expected age-adjusted educational attainment. While the effectiveness of choropleth maps for exploring the spatial characteristics of bivariate relationships has been discussed by a number of authors, our technique of using borders to highlight a threshold value appears to be under-utilised.

Reading the Cauldron: Landlords and Texts in George A. Birmingham's The Seething Pot

Reading the Cauldron:Landlords and Texts in George A. Birmingham's The Seething Pot Gerard Dineen (bio) The Reverend Canon James Owen Hannay was no ordinary Church of Ireland clergyman. Born in Belfast in 1865 and ordained in his mid-twenties, in 1905 he adopted the pseudonym "George A. Birmingham" for his first novel, The Seething Pot, and thereafter continued writing both fiction and nonfiction at a prodigious rate until his death in 1950.1 Though popular and sometimes deeply controversial in his lifetime, his fictional output has rarely received serious scholarly recognition. Indeed, despite the often positive initial reception of The Seething Pot, most surveys of the Irish novel from the past fifteen years only briefly refer to Birmingham's contribution to Irish fiction, and all of them fail to mention The Seething Pot.2 [End Page 100] In contrast, John Wilson Foster's Irish Novels 1890–1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction offers a sustained discussion of one of Birmingham's novels, along with many passing references to the writer and his work.3 To some degree this more extensive treatment by Foster of Birmingham's work is to be expected, as Foster's survey endeavors to recover "neglected novels that represent literary subgenres active during the years of the Revival but that have gone largely unacknowledged."4 This description is virtually a definition of Birmingham's early novels, and Foster makes the following thoughtful observation about the merits of such fiction in general: "a prolific lower-ranking novelist … can across a plethora of texts generate an impressive wattage of social and cultural illumination."5 Later Foster mentions an idea propounded by Claud Cockburn regarding British best-sellers and the pertinence of such fiction in any account of recent British history, and he then argues that Irish history would also benefit from an appreciation of Irish popular novels from the past. Foster's assertion here is highly apposite with regard to Birmingham's early fiction: If indeed a given best-seller expresses the prevailing political and social climate of which it is the product—the public sector of life—then an extraordinary opportunity to understand the Irish weather of 1890–1940 has been lost. In fact, the loss has been the greater when the novel in question has not just been the product of the times but has tried to make sense of the times, sometimes even change those times, most obviously in the case of the so-called problem novel.6 The Seething Pot, as we shall see, is a novel that operates on all of these levels: the product of the culture and politics of late Victorian and early Edwardian Ireland, particularly the legislative changes that affected the landed class of the period, it was also a political text that sought to understand and influence the vortex of events in early twentieth-century Ireland.7 Birmingham's political literary debut is specifically preoccupied with the topic of Irish landlordism, and the novel's focus on the Irish landlord can be accounted for by reference to two [End Page 101] key legislative changes from the period, both of which resulted in the attenuation of Irish landlordism shortly before Birmingham began his career as a novelist.8 The Local Government Act of 1898 replaced the grand juries with elected county councils and thus "broke the landlord stranglehold on local affairs." As a result, the act "deprived the Irish landed class of much of their prestige and power" as it "placed the bulk of local institutions in popular, and therefore nationalist hands."9 Furthermore, just a few years later, George Wyndham's Land Act of 1903 marked a watershed in the history of Irish tenurial legislation as it "proved the decisive breakthrough in moves—until then uncertain and halting—towards making a tenant proprietory [sic] the core of Irish rural society."10 Thus began the gradual legislative eviction of the landlord from Irish society, later described by Birmingham in his nonfiction as a species of dethronement: "the English had quite as much to do with taking away their land from them as the Irish agitators. Act after Act was passed by Parliament, sometimes by one party, sometimes by...

The strange death of multi-party Britain: the UK General Election of 2017

The UK General Election of 8 June 2017 was one of the most dramatic and unexpected in recent British history. The election was called early and came just a year after the 2016 referendum on Britain...

The origins of the Jimmy Savile scandal

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the origins of the Jimmy Savile Scandal in which the former BBC entertainer was accused of a series of sexual offences after his death in 2011. The case has had a massive impact on UK policing and criminal justice policy and on care work, with implications for due process and public expenditure in responding to reports of sexual abuse.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on an Economic and Social Research Council funded project to collate data on the Savile case. It is based, primarily, on interview material from former pupils and staff members from Duncroft School, from whence initial allegations against Savile emanate, contrasting these with media accounts.FindingsThe research provides a very different picture of Duncroft and the contemporary policy context to that presented in media accounts. A questioning account of the origins of the scandal emerges. The findings may lend themselves to a moral panics analysis but also point to the power of dominant stories in influencing public policy.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is based on only a very small sample of interviews. The material is ethically sensitive in that it may be claimed or used to cast doubt on accounts of abuse.Social implicationsThe implications of the wider project from which it draws are potentially profound, casting doubt on the origins and detail of the Savile scandal.Originality/valueThe paper addresses one of the major socio-cultural episodes in recent British history, which has had a profound effect on the workings of the criminal justice system, signalling a shift away from a presumption of innocence. It also offers insight into the cultural context of care work and the possibility, especially for males, of being subject to allegations made against them.

Political spin and public opinion: #Imatworkjeremy

“ #Imatworkjeremy. Not just this weekend, in fact as a full time trauma consultant, I work one weekend a month with scheduled operating and clinical sessions from 8am to 10pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.” There has been something of a political storm in the UK health service recently, sparked by the allegation from the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, that senior and junior doctors are not working a full seven-day week, and the consequent lack of services is ‘placing lives at risk’. The ensuing public relations war between the British Medical Association and the Department of Health has been one of the biggest public spats of recent British political history, overtaking many of the social media channels and culminating in over 200 000 signatures to a petition calling for the resignation of Jeremy Hunt.1 The Government response is interesting. Citing a paper2 (although not …

Moira Buffini's Handbagged: British History and Politics as Indirect Sources

Literature has traditionally functioned as a means of entertainment and education. In achieving this dual purpose literary texts mostly operate through indirect allusions, implications and concealments. This paper explores Moira Buffini's 2013 play, Handbagged, in its use of British history and politics as indirect sources for its subject matter. The play is significant for mainly two reasons: in terms of content and form. Contentwise the playtext can be studied as an approximation, deconstruction and reconstruction of recent British history and politics in an indirect style. Formwise the playwright employs interesting techniques of doubling in creating an older and a younger version of Britain's two most powerful women. While the playwright imagines the private nature of the Queen's and Thatcher's conversations, she creates a satirical, political theatre which is also a rich history lesson. As the title suggests the play is concerned with the past and the way history and politics are crystallised, deconstructed and recreated on stage at present.

The Riots of the Underclass?: Stigmatisation, Mediation and the Government of Poverty and Disadvantage in Neoliberal Britain

The riots in England in August 2011 comprised one of the most significant events of civil unrest in recent British history. A consensus rapidly emerged, notably within political commentary, print journalism, television and online news media coverage of these five nights of rioting, that these were the riots of the underclass. This article explores how and why the conceptual and perceptual frame of the underclass – a frame through which child poverty and youth unemployment are conceived as consequences of a cocktail of ‘bad individual choices’, an absence of moral judgement, poor parenting, hereditary or genetic deficiencies, and/or welfare dependency – was mobilised as a means of explaining and containing the meaning of these riots. It briefly traces the longer cultural and political history of the underclass as an abjectifying category and then examines how this framing of the riots was used to generate public consent for the shift from protective liberal forms of welfare to penal neoliberal ‘workfare’ regimes. In his response to the riots, Paul Gilroy argued that ‘one of the worst forms of poverty that's shaped our situation is poverty of the imagination’ ( Gilroy 2011 ). Following Gilroy's call for alternative political aesthetics and in order to engender critical sociological perspectives that might contest the downward social mobility and deepening inequalities which neoliberal social and economic policies are affecting, the aim of this article is to fracture the consensus that these were the riots of the underclass. By exposing the underclass as a powerful political myth, it is possible to transform public understandings of poverty and disadvantage and vitalise understandings of neoliberalism as class struggle.

Operation Motorman (1972) and the search for a coherent British counterinsurgency strategy in Northern Ireland

The role of the British Army in Northern Ireland during Operation Banner (1969–2007) is an instructive case study of counterinsurgency operations as well as an important chapter in recent British military history. Given troops deployed to the province as aid to the civil power, it is particularly useful in discussions about the principle of minimum force. This article seeks to explore the issue of minimum force through the example of Operation Motorman, the Army's successful attempt to remove the barricades, which had established so-go areas for the security forces in Northern Ireland.

Church Growth in Britain: A Response to Steve Bruce*

This article examines the extent of church growth in Britain in recent decades, in response to the articulation of the secularisation thesis with regard to Christian congregations in recent British history. It shows that alongside the widely recognised phenomenon of church decline, there has been significant church growth—notably in London, amongst black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities and amongst new churches. This runs counter to many discussions of religion in recent British history, which assume overwhelming and ongoing church decline and which assume any church growth is peripheral. The article recognises evidence of significant church decline—but critiques the view that this should be the sole or the dominant narrative. The findings of the article throw up a range of questions that offer significant new avenues for further research.

“The Hero As Historian”: Pieter Geyl and the Condition of Carlyle after Hitler

“The Hero As Historian”:Pieter Geyl and the Condition of Carlyle after Hitler Owen Dudley Edwards (bio) I. If we were to fasten a postscript to Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, entitled “The Hero as Historian,” we should probably find that the twentieth century demanded more physical and mental courage of its historians than the nineteenth. The hero-as-historian of Carlyle and totalitarianism, towering over the rest of us, is the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (1887–1966). Geyl’s place in Anglophone historiography is secured by his essays on British historians and “The American Civil War and the Problem of Inevitability.” 1 In European studies, his volumes on the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and his Napoleon, For and Against, published in 1949 but initially written during his imprisonment by the Nazis, should be held in admiration far beyond our lifetimes. No more heroic entry in Who’s Who exists than Geyl’s. Among the notable events of his extraordinary life, the entry lists: in 1924 [Geyl’s] title changed into Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in the University of London; resigned 1935; Professor of Modern History, University of Utrecht, 1938–68; 7 Oct. 1940 arrested as hostage, spent thirteen months in Buchenwald, then over two years in various internment camps in Holland, released 14 Feb. 1944; 28 Nov. 1942 dismissed by Reichskommissar from professorship on ground of suspect “general mentality,” restored after liberation of Holland…. May 1941 elected Reichskommissar, confirmed by Queen on liberation of Holland. (Who Was Who 421–22) The entry concludes with a list of visiting lectureships and professorships in the United States and in Britain, awards from both countries and from the Netherlands, honorary degrees, a British CBE, and “Ordre pour le mérite (Germany), 1959.” [End Page 167] Geyl was not, of course, the only Dutch historian with war service as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, but he was the greatest, as his prodigious list of prestigious publications in Who’s Who bears witness. Perhaps no comparable hero-as-historian in World War II could be named, other than the great Marc Bloch of France, tortured and shot while in the Resistance. The blazing pride of Geyl’s listing of his imprisonments, degradation, and dismissal by the Nazis almost parodies the distinctions with which most of the rest of Who’s Who invited attention to their achievements, but the state decoration from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 1959 bore the warmth of generous reconciliation. I never met Geyl, but I once had a long interview with his successor as Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in London, Gustaag Johannes Renier, and at the beginning of a fascinating conversation, he asked me to do him the honor of calling him “Professor Renier” on the ground that he regarded tenure of the chair that had been previously occupied by his friend and mentor as his own greatest claim to respect. S. T. Bindoff, professor of history at Queen Mary College, London, translator of Geyl’s work and author of Tudor England, a dazzling work of scholarship that may have outsold all of Geyl’s books together, made it clear to me that the latter Geyl was the greatest historian he had known, and that must have included all of the active great historians of the UK in his time. 2 Geyl’s war heroism was incidental to their admiration, but it becomes vital when we look at his ideas on Carlyle. His twenty-two years in London, six as a journalist including World War I (when the Dutch were neutral), gave him primary authority in recent British history, particularly in English cultural self-image. It did not necessarily produce historiographical Anglophilia. The English in 1903 were on the plateau of their imperial self-assurance, despite their prewar symptoms of unease, and as the imperial preoccupation diminished after the war, a somewhat xenophobic insular superiority took its place—the disillusioned intellectuals of Bloomsbury and elsewhere being nonetheless England-obsessed for all their mockery of past propaganda. Renier, who also followed Geyl in becoming a Dutch journalist in London, would write a hard-hitting but fair...

Terence Fisher and British science fiction cinema

Terence Fisher is a major figure in British cinema of the 1950s and 1960s whose work has been written about a number of film historians including David Pirie and Peter Hutchings. However, this academic work has largely concentrated on Fisher’s popular and influential Gothic horror films made for Hammer studios. His early work of the 1950s in the crime and science fiction genres has often been neglected as it does not fit in the horror category with which he is usually associated. This essay is the first to consider the five science fiction films which Fisher made during this period. The focus is twofold. Firstly, the essay traces the authorial characteristics which typify his work and shows how these are manifest in the films under consideration. Secondly, in placing the films within the wider context of British science fiction of the post-war era, consideration can be given to political and historical discourses within the work. The latter allows for a detailed discussion of the impact of the Cold War on British culture as British science fiction, and Fisher’s work specifically responded directly to the public anxieties produced by the political situation of the period. A number of British science fiction film and novels provide evidence of this and the approach offers a fruitful way to examine Fisher’s films. The essay appears in a relatively new journal but one which has already established itself as the leading publication on the genre in the UK, offering an alternative view to more established publications from the US. The essay contributes to recent attempts to revisit the existing science fiction cannon and explore previously neglected work, as well as adding to the broader discussion of the 1950s and 1960s as crucial periods of radical change in recent British cultural history.

Life Beyond the Grave: New Churches in York and the Afterlife, c. 1982–2007

Most studies of Christianity in recent British history are pessimistic about church life in Britain, varying only in the depth of their pessimism. Alongside the assumption that Christianity in Britain is in inexorable decline is the assumption that traditional Christian notions about the afterlife – and indeed stress on the afterlife at all – are fast disappearing. Even studies of charismatic Christianity, the most recent major Christian movement, see it as stagnant or in decline. However, a study of the city of York shows such pessimism to be overstated. Whilst mainline denominations are mostly in slow or rapid decline, a large number of ‘new churches’ have arisen. This paper shows how these churches perceive the afterlife. It uncovers a rich seam of contemporary theology from below. Though largely unknown to those outside its congregations, this strand of belief is already of considerable significance and is likely to become more so in the twenty-first century. This paper offers contemporary religious history, showing that dramatic shifts within Christian history are not solely the preserve of previous centuries, but have taken place in recent decades.

Tony Blair and The Constitution

Under Tony Blair's premiership, the British constitution has undergone extensive change, unparalleled in recent British history, but without the Prime Minister having a developed view of what form of constitution is desirable for the United Kingdom. The changes that have taken place have had unintended consequences but with no mechanisms in place to deal with those consequences and illustrate the extent to which the constitutional framework of the United Kingdom is unravelling. The challenge facing Tony Blair's successor is to look holistically at the constitution and identify an intellectually coherent approach to constitutional change.

Reconstructing the Past: Refugee Writings on the Kindertransport

The transportation of 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe between 1938 and 1939 remains one of the most celebrated acts of recent British history. This article analyses the memoirs of the former refugees themselves and sets out the case for reexamining popular representations of the scheme, addressing the diversity of experience for the children once in England, the hardships and emotional upheaval encountered during this stage of their young lives and looking at some of the limitations of the Kindertransport itself.