History Workshop Journal

Handley, Sasha

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbx050pmid: N/A

Abstract This article offers a methodological framework for a purposeful interrogation of ‘emotional objects’ – material objects that fostered, shaped and sustained an assortment of emotional practices that, in turn, had dramatic historical consequences. It examines the production, use and meanings of an ordinary household object: a single English bed-sheet dating to the early eighteenth century. The locations, hands and regimes of value through which the sheet travelled are a core focus, alongside the practical and emotional dimensions of the sheet’s creation in the early eighteenth century; its perception and use as a politicized holy relic; its commercialization among nineteenth-century antiquarians; and its adoption as a commemorative political object in a twenty-first-century museum collection. The bed-sheet’s history uncovers a hidden chapter of Jacobite resistance and reveals the vital activism of women and household objects in sustaining the political and religious sensibilities of early modern English Catholicism. This catalogue entry describes a linen bed-sheet that has lain in the Museum of London’s dress and textile collection since its purchase in 1934. It appears, at first glance, to be a very ordinary sort of household object, perhaps only noteworthy because of its noble creator and its age. Most bed-sheets of its era have perished with years of heavy use and vigorous laundering; it is thus a rare survival. It is typical of many good quality early modern bed-sheets in its materials and composition. Linens of varying quality were the most popular choice of textile for bed-sheets throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and indeed until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.2 The sheets that lay closest to the skin during sleep were prized for their cool and smooth sensations, which were believed to help secure the vitality of body and mind as part of well-established healthcare regimes. Linen bed-sheets were also cherished for their associations with cleanliness and spiritual purity. Linen was a substance that routinely traversed the porous boundary between the natural and supernatural realms, being widely used in the manufacture of ecclesiastical vestments, burial shrouds, and as protective wrappings for objects of worship.3 The size of this sheet, like its materials, is also commonplace, being consistent with a set of eight surviving linen sheets in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and it shares their make-up, being sewn together from two selvedge widths of linen with the top and bottom hems turned and stitched by hand. The sheet has never been displayed in the Museum of London and it does not yet feature in its online catalogue. How then has this seemingly mundane bed-sheet inspired the fascination of a historian? The few bed-sheets that survive from this era often have an unusual biography, and this sheet is no exception. This textile uncovers hidden features of Jacobitism: notably, the vital role played by women and household objects in sustaining the vigour of an embattled religious and political movement. At the same time, this micro-study suggests the unparalleled capacity of particular objects and materials to summon, mediate, and direct affective states of mind and bodily behaviours across time and space. As such, it offers a methodological framework for assimilating objects at the heart of history of emotions scholarship – a scholarship that is firmly tethered to testimony and textual remnants. Such an exercise, by its very nature, is characterized by a degree of informed speculation: about the nature of affective states that were not verbalized, and about the nature of the subject-object material relations under scrutiny. These challenges routinely exercise the minds of scholars in history of emotions and material culture but I alert the less familiar reader to them from the outset. I have drawn, wherever possible, on contemporary contextual evidence to offset these difficulties and I invite the reader to gauge my success. The history of this bed-sheet is partly revealed by its remarkably good condition. It lacks the friction marks, heavy stains, and repair work that you would expect to see on a well-used textile of this kind. The sheet was probably only used for sleeping under for a short period of time at the beginning of its life, but the reasons for its survival transcend this everyday purpose. The history of this bed-sheet nevertheless helps to disclose the unique sensory experience, meanings, and embodied qualities associated with early modern bedding textiles, whose make-up and use may have structured a range of sensations and psychological states. Bedsteads and their textiles offered a material stage for sleep, and for key lifecycle experiences such as childbirth, courtship, marriage and death. They were consequently understood as complex sites of love, of physical and psychological comfort, and of bodily and spiritual transformation. They were, at the same time, sites of vulnerability, crisis and loss that bridged a physical and imaginative gap between the daily life of the household and the supernatural realm that lay beyond the grave. These understandings were deeply embedded within Christian culture, and they were often literally materialized in the textiles that enveloped the body at night.4 Bed-sheets were highly likely to have synchronized human affections and sensations because of the degree of time, labour and imagination that was invested in their production and maintenance. The creation and adaptation of bedding textiles, from coverlets and quilts to bed-sheets, bolsters and pillowcases, was commonplace. Many households had the raw materials and equipment to grow, spin and dye the linen for their own bed-sheets whilst wills and household inventories show a consistent desire for, and presence of ‘wrought’ bed furnishings, a term used to describe textiles that were worked or adapted by hand and usually at home.5 These practices were partly undertaken for practical economy: accounts of recycling and recovering good-quality bedding feature regularly in diaries, in correspondence and in account books that list payments to local craftsmen and women.6 The practical benefits of handcrafting bedding textiles were enhanced by the opportunities this afforded to showcase the needlework skills of women. Needlework was a central component of female education that allowed women to develop and display their domestic virtues, skill and piety, as well as offering them an outlet for emotional expression. Creations of the needle have thus been described as akin to creations of the pen in expressing the thoughts and feelings of early modern women.7 The lengthy process of making bed-sheets likely also encouraged thoughtful meditation on the task in hand as adept fingers crafted their raw materials into a pleasing and bespoke whole. Since these textiles were often made, or gifted, to coincide with an impending marriage, or to celebrate the birth or baptism of a child, the thoughts and affections they inspired went well beyond the cost of their materials and aesthetic appeal – they were closely bound up with the process of creation and acquisition.8 A final and deep-seated incentive for making and personalizing bedding textiles relates to expectations of a sound night’s sleep. Falling asleep is a unique physiological and cultural process that embraces sensations, perceptions and emotions. We fall asleep because we are tired and because we expect sleep to come at certain times and in certain places where we experience recognizable sights, smells and sensations. Regular sensory interaction with the same sheets was a source of physical and psychological comfort that recalled memories and feelings of safety, belonging and refreshment.9 Men, women and children routinely expressed a desire to rest in familiar and secure surroundings, beneath comfortable textiles with an assured and meaningful provenance. This desire was heavily coloured by the array of earthly and spiritual dangers to which they felt exposed during sleep, and from which they tried to defend themselves by begging for God’s protection, and by resting, where possible, in secure, clean and enclosed environments. Bed-sheets were thus an essential source of safety and comfort at a time of acute vulnerability. These contexts are critical for understanding the history of this bed-sheet. In what follows, I trace the main staging posts of its journey across more than 300 years to show how the sheet’s creation, exchange and use moulded an array of personal and communal emotions, and religious and political sensibilities. The journey begins with the sheet’s manufacture within the context of a single marriage, before tracing its transformation from an ordinary household object into an emotive holy relic and a powerful agent of political resistance. The journey continues into the twentieth century with the sheet’s commoditization, before ending with the latest phase of its lifecycle, as an object of national historical memory. MARRIAGE MATERIAL Beds and their textiles occupied an especially resonant place within the practical and emotional economy of early modern households, ensuring their security and longevity at a fundamental level. Their importance was reflected in their value. Bedsteads, complete with their furnishings, usually accounted for one-third of the estimated value of a household’s goods. Heavy economic and personal investment in their purchase, creation and maintenance was a marker of their combined practical and symbolic significance. Beds were of course intimately connected with the formation and day-to-day maintenance of marital relations.10 They were sites of conjugal pleasure and conflict, and places in which the family unit was consolidated in affective and reproductive terms. Marriage was often the prompt for a couple to invest in a new or second-hand bedstead, or to buy or make new furnishings for those that had been gifted by family members. Sheets that were purchased in a semi-finished or complete state could also be personalized with the simple addition of initials, which were commonly embroidered in the corners of a sheet or just beneath its hems. If beds were constitutive of marriage formation and practice, they were also linguistically associated with its collapse. Separation a mensa et thoro, translates as separation from ‘bed and board’, or from ‘bed and table’, and it referred to the legal process by which married couples could formalize a de facto separation without legal divorce.11 The personal and sensory associations of bed-sheets thus assured them a special place in the emotional landscapes of home since they could articulate a sense of continuity, comfort and consolation within daily life and at pivotal moments in the lifecycle. Sheet 34.63 exemplifies these meanings in dramatic fashion. (Fig. 1) Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Linen Bed sheet 34.63. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Linen Bed sheet 34.63. The sheet was embroidered by Anna Maria Radcliffe, countess of Derwentwater, some time after 24 February 1716 – the date on which her beloved husband James Radcliffe, third earl of Derwentwater, was beheaded on Tower Hill at the tender age of twenty-six. James was the eldest son of Edward, second earl of Derwentwater, and Lady Mary Tudor, who was the natural daughter of King Charles II and actress Mary Davies. Edward raised his son as a Catholic and he established a life-long friendship with the young Prince James, alongside whom he was educated at the exiled Stuart court at Saint Germain. James Radcliffe’s future wife was born to the Catholic Webb family from Wiltshire, and the two sweethearts married in 1712 after meeting in Paris where Anna Maria was being educated at the Ursuline convent. Radcliffe’s fate was sealed just three years later, however, when he took up arms in the failed Jacobite uprising of 1715. He was arrested on the field of battle at Preston, charged with high treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London between his capture in November 1715 and his execution four months later. It was during his imprisonment that Radcliffe likely slept beneath the bed-sheet. This is the claim made by the object itself, which bears the following cross-stitched inscription: ‘The sheet off my dear x dear Lord’s Bed in the wretched Tower of London February 1716 x Ann C of Darwent=Waters †’ (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Cross-stitch inscription from linen bed-sheet, 34.63. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Cross-stitch inscription from linen bed-sheet, 34.63. Prisoners in the Tower were required to furnish their own quarters and so it seems likely that the sheet was sourced from the Radcliffes’ ordinary household linen stock. This was probably the textile that lay closest to the earl’s skin in the last months of his life, when it absorbed his scent and bodily traces. It was also the sheet beneath which James and his wife may have spent their final nights together, and perhaps where their daughter was conceived – Anna Maria lodged with her husband in his Tower apartment until an outbreak of smallpox forced her departure in January 1716.12 The sheet’s physical connection to the earl ensured that his widow would cherish it as an organic memorial to a loving and faithful husband. The materials that Anna Maria chose to sew this heartfelt inscription sealed the sheet’s longevity and its quintessentially embodied nature. She did not work with expensive gilt or silk thread but instead threaded her needle with human hair. Microscopic analysis of the sheet shows two distinct hair colours – one fair and the other much darker – that were interwoven to make a thicker, longer and more workable thread. The cut end of the hair shaft shown in Figure 3 shows the typical oval cross-section characteristic of the head hair of Europeans. The distinctive patterns of cuticular scales shown in Figure 4, which are also typical of human hair, are abraded, probably due to degradation of the hair over time. The diameters of the two hair-shaft samples are approximately seventy-seven and eighty-three microns respectively – consistent with the average diameter of adult European head hair.13 A comparison of portraits and physical descriptions of Anna Maria and James shows that she had much darker brown hair than her fair-haired spouse. Whilst the comparative diameter of the two hair samples does not show a decisive variation, the colour difference between them is marked; it suggests that Anna Maria used her own hair and twisted it with the golden locks of her dead husband, in a symbolic act of memorialization that conjured thoughts and sensations of their intertwined bodies in his last days on earth.14 These final encounters were made all the more poignant by Anna Maria’s second pregnancy. Beneath the inscription, she stitched a love heart in open-work embroidery, a familiar yet highly-skilled technique in which linen threads were drawn outwards to create empty spaces on top of a white or cream linen base. (Fig. 5) The white-work embroidery surrounding the heart is typical of naturalistic motifs from this period. Nuns have been identified as the sole practitioners of white-work embroidery prior to the mid-eighteenth century, and they educated their pupils in this delicate art. Girls were taught at an early age how to sew letters of the alphabet in cross-stitch onto samplers.15 The countess, who was educated at the Parisian Ursuline convent, may well have had the knowledge and skill to create this porous heart motif to symbolize the corporeal quality of her love and the sheet’s place at the material heart of the Radcliffe marriage. The bed-sheet’s composition signalled the extremes of marital love and loss, which was echoed in surviving letters penned by the earl on the eve of his execution. Just hours before his death he wrote to his wife: My dearest worldly Treasure, I have sent you the enclosed in which is contained all I know, but God knows I have as yet found little advantage by being a plain dealer, but on the contrary, have always suffered for it, except by my sincerity to you, my dear for which you made me as happy as this world can afford, & now I offer up the loss I am likely to have of you as a means to procure me Eternal Happiness. Where I pray God we may meet, after you have some years exercised your great Virtues to the Edification of all that know you… Adieu. Adieu. My dear Great Comfort Anna Maria preserved this precious letter and marked it on the back with the words ‘My Dear Dear Lord’s letter to me’, in an echo of the words that she stitched into the bed-sheet.16 She used her needle and hair to express the sensations and sentiments of love and loss that her husband had expressed in ink. Using the bed-sheet as the vehicle for these feelings exemplified its potency as the physical and emotional heart of her marriage. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Microscopic analysis of first hair sample. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Microscopic analysis of first hair sample. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Microscopic analysis of second hair sample. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Microscopic analysis of second hair sample. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Inscription and open-work heart from linen bed-sheet, 34.63. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Inscription and open-work heart from linen bed-sheet, 34.63. THE MEANINGS OF HAIR Sewing with hair was an unusual and highly symbolic act. Only four other extant examples of English embroidery solely composed of hair have been identified before the eighteenth century; most of them are finely crafted needle lace bands that were likely worn around the wrist as love tokens or commemorative items. The cross-stitch embroidery on the bed-sheet, which is more crudely worked by comparison, thus appears unique.17 There is little evidence of professional hair embroidery services in the early eighteenth century, and it is highly improbable that Anna Maria would have entrusted an external agent with this project. Sending the materials to a professional ran the risk of a stranger’s hair being substituted for, or combined with, that of the loved one. Outsourcing would have also negated the solace that Anna Maria undoubtedly received from long hours spent in close contact with her husband’s remains. Anna Maria was likely to be capable of the skilled white-work embroidery and the hair-work due to her early convent education, noted previously. Whether she worked alone, or with the assistance of trusted companions, her endeavour was remarkable because of her choice of materials. Human hair is much finer than animal hair or cotton, linen or silk thread. It is also slippery and springy to the touch. Surviving needle-lace hair embroidery shows traces of wax, or a similar fixing agent, to keep the intricate designs in place as they were worked. Hair strands, which could be intertwined to create a more workable thread, also have to be worked in one direction to achieve a smooth finish. These practical difficulties were worth overcoming, however, because the use and arrangement of human hair was understood as one of the most potent expressions of personal and political identity within early modern culture. Hair was fashioned to express a wide range of personal, religious and political allegiances as well as being a marker of age, gender and sexuality.18 The countess’s embroidery also followed in the footsteps of female supporters of the Royalist cause who incorporated King Charles I’s hair into a series of miniatures, which were cherished as relics after his death.19 By sewing with her own hair, and with that of her husband, the countess perhaps wished to create a similar relic and to signal her eternal fidelity to her husband and to the Stuart cause; she never remarried and spent the last two years of her life in relative isolation, mourning his loss. The hair inscription has an obvious connection to mortuary culture and to memory. Locks of hair featured regularly in love tokens such as posy rings and in mourning jewellery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, intended to fix the memory of a particular person, or an important life event, in the wearer’s mind.20 Marcia Pointon describes hair as akin to a genetic signature when used in a memorial context, which served as a singular ‘portrait’ of the deceased and triggered intimate memories of them through the material’s continuous contact with the skin. Repeated sensory interaction with a loved one’s hair thus worked to promote a ‘hyper-remembering’ of them.21 That hair objects could stand in for the body of an absent loved one is made clear in John Donne’s lyric poem The Relique, where the speaker’s mistress is represented by a ‘bracelet of bright haire’, discovered glistening around the speaker’s dead wrist, that magically enables their love to transcend death.22 Hair ornaments materialized desires for a persistent physical bond that transcended death and symbolically connected the deceased to the wearer in spite of their separation. It seems especially pertinent that the countess eschewed the precious materials of a mourning ring and concentrated her efforts instead on the bed-sheet, whose associations were much more intimate. By sewing this textile with her own hair, and with that of her husband, Anna Maria likely hoped to form a similar bridge with the spouse from which she was now separated. Moreover, when read within a Christian context, keeping some part of a loved one’s body was a recognized tactic to bring about a reunion in the afterlife as the dead gathered up their dispersed body parts at the resurrection.23 The intimate personal associations of hair, combined with its durability, made it the ideal material to achieve these dual objectives. Physiological explanations of hair growth and hair loss offer another critical context for deciphering the symbolism of the inscription. Dominant humoral explanations of the body categorized hair as a form of excrement. Healthy hair growth was fostered by a good balance of bodily humours and by sufficient heat and radical moisture within the body, which pushed the hair out to the body’s exterior and purified the skin along the way. In common with other forms of excrement such as urine, hair was an important diagnostic tool, precisely because it was a product of the body’s internal flows made visible on its outer surface. Humoral models of hair growth provide one critical reason why the condition of an individual’s hair was read as evidence of their emotional state. Hair loss, for example, when not the result of the natural ageing process, signalled a change in circumstance or health and it was often interpreted as an organic response to personal trauma, whereby the coldness engendered by an excess of sorrow withdrew nourishment from the hair root, which corroded from within. Read within a medical context therefore, the countess’s use of her own hair in the sheet’s embroidery offered a way to stage the depth of her distress during her widowhood by suggesting that her hair had actually fallen out.24 This unnatural shedding, which represented a dematerialization of her gender, would have been all the more resonant because of her gender and youth.25 If Anna Maria cut her own hair to craft this inscription, which is another possibility, she may well have been sensible of the theatre that was associated with this deed. As Marcia Pointon observes, representations of voluntary hair cutting – categorized as an act of self-mutilation in art, literature and Holy Scripture, usually denoted ‘a moment of high drama’ within an individual’s life.26 Hair cutting was a recognized gesture of grief in early modern culture, especially for women, for whom hair was the crowning glory of their femininity. In the 1620s the recently widowed Lady Richmond cut off her hair ‘close by the rootes’ as a visible sign of her loss.27 The aesthetic drama evinced by exposing the scalp’s open pores to the elements was heightened by the physiological consequences of this act, which rendered the body vulnerable to disease by removing its protective outer barrier. Those who chose this path communicated a powerful message about the depths of their misery, which caused them to neglect even the most basic principles of healthcare. Figuring the bed-sheet and its iconic hair-inscription as a performance of personal distress would have had acute resonance in a society that Stefan Hanβ has rightly described as peculiarly ‘hair literate’: a society in which the style and condition of an individual’s hair allowed them to be visually classified by age, gender, complexion, and, crucially, by their emotional state.28 Anna Maria may have wished to lay bare her physical deformity, and thereby her anguish, to underline the unnatural, premature end of her marriage and the injustice of her husband’s sentence. Her distress was no doubt deepened by her disappointed hopes for royal mercy. Following James Radcliffe’s conviction, petitions were brought before both Houses of Parliament to procure a pardon. Anna Maria made her own contribution to this campaign. She moved from her home at Dilston Hall in Northumberland to Dagenham Park in Essex after her husband’s arrest and from there she lobbied for a reprieve alongside other prominent female supporters of the earl, including his mother, Lady Mary Tudor. The pregnant countess gained an audience with King George I at St James’s Palace where she begged him to spare her husband’s life as he had spared three of the earl’s fellow conspirators. Her efforts, however, were in vain as the king determined to make an example of Radcliffe and to seize his lucrative estates in Cumberland and Northumberland, stretching over 40,000 acres.29 The only mercy Radcliffe received was to have his initial sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering commuted to beheading. EMBROIDERING THE SHEET The transformation of the bed-sheet into the countess’s chief object of mourning can only be fully comprehended by exploring the implicit relationship between beds, death and Christian culture. Liminal qualities were commonly attributed to beds and their textiles, which were understood as points of slippage between different states of consciousness and as material gateways between this world and the next. It was in bed that most people died, and it was here that they performed the prayers that book-ended and sanctified the hours of sleep on a nightly basis. Bedside devotions were akin to miniature rites of passage and the content of morning, evening and midnight prayers expressed anxieties about the risk of destruction during sleep, whilst begging for God’s protection.30 Beds thus inspired thoughts of the end of life on a routine basis. They were singled out as the most apposite place to prepare body and soul for death’s approach since they intertwined the physical, spiritual and affective lives of men and women, especially at moments of crisis.31 In 1721 Anna Maria left England for Brussels – the city in which she died just two years later. It was here that she might have found the time and solitude to embroider the sheet, which would have taken a lone seamstress months or even years to complete. Anna Maria appears to have led a reclusive life in Brussels, where she fled with her children to escape the clutches of their grandmother, Lady Mary Tudor, who had petitioned Parliament for the children’s guardianship so that she could bring them up as Protestants. In fleeing, Anna Maria attended to one of her husband’s last requests – that his children should be raised as Catholics.32 It was in Brussels that the countess continued her deep mourning, praying daily for her husband’s soul in her private chapel. She left her house only to pay weekly visits to the English Augustinian convent known as St Monica’s in nearby Louvain. Anna Maria was deeply attached to the convent, choosing to be buried in its cloister, and it was here that she likely found consolation, encouragement, and perhaps assistance in her quest to transform the sheet into an object of personal mourning – and, more importantly, into a wider focus of spiritual veneration, which formed part of a deliberate campaign to secure James Radcliffe’s reputation as a Catholic martyr. Help for the project could have come from the earl’s aunts, Catherine and Elizabeth Radcliffe, who were professed as choir nuns at St Monica’s in July 1688. Anna Maria had corresponded with both women before she left England, and in September 1716 Catherine and Elizabeth sent Anna Maria a gift of money and some pictures that were enclosed with a letter from George Pippard.33 In return for these gifts, Anna Maria sent a small token to her aunts. Elizabeth Radcliffe wrote to thank her for ‘the pretious gift yu were pleased to send us by good Mr Pepper wch is a treasure I will keep whilst I liue & ease my heart when full of grief for the loss of so deseruing & Dr a friend with the thought of the eternall reward he now enjoys for his true fidelity to God K and C’.34 The nature of the gift was not disclosed but it may have been some part of the earl’s body – most likely a lock of his hair – since ‘Mr Pepper’ was George Pippard, alias ‘Father Brown’, who served as chaplain to James Radcliffe during his imprisonment and who was entrusted with the transportation of his bodily remains to Europe. In 1716 Pippard secretly conveyed Radcliffe’s heart to its final resting place with the English Augustinian Canonesses in Paris. Prior to this, the earl’s body had been kept by his wife at Dagenham Park, before being delivered to the London surgeon Roger Metcalfe who removed the earl’s heart, embalmed his body, and reportedly sewed his head back on in preparation for burial.35 Anna Maria thus had ample opportunity to cut her husband’s hair, some of which she gifted to friends and relatives, including her daughter to whom she bequeathed ‘a little locket of my Lords hair’ in her will.36 This was perhaps all that remained after she had used the remaining locks to embroider the bed-sheet. The process of embroidering the sheet structured and staged Anna Maria’s mourning. The intricate white-work embroidery comprised the open-work love heart with a thistle positioned above it, exotic flowers, coiled stems and leaves. A subtle infusion of thistles and sunflowers amongst the foliage prefigured Jacobite decorative motifs that became prevalent after the 1745 rising, but this decoration also signalled loyalty to the exiled Stuart monarchs and aligned James Radcliffe’s memory with martyrological themes surrounding James II.37 It is highly probable that the hair-work was completed alongside the open-work and white-work embroidery, given the redolent symbolism of the decorative theme and the way that it frames the hair inscription. For Anna Maria, this extensive embroidery project would have afforded hours of peaceful contemplation during which she could reflect on her lost love and replay memories and sensations of marital felicity triggered by the sheet’s texture and scent. We can surmise that regular handling of the smooth stiff linen may have generated a sequence of emotional states from a sense of devastating loss, to consolatory recollections of intimacy, to hopes of future reconciliation with her husband in the next life. The countess’s grief was intense, of long duration, and to some, unseemly. Bonaventure Giffard, bishop of Madaura, had provided holy counsel to James Radcliffe in the days preceding his execution. He wrote regularly to Anna Maria and in a letter on the eve of the first anniversary of Radcliffe’s death, Giffard encouraged Anna Maria to moderate her grief, and instead look towards heaven ‘& beholding ther ye person you lov’d most upon earth; seeing him at ye height of all glory, & happiness, you will in an extasy of ioy, pour forth yr heart by A thousand gratefulle acknowledgements of Gods infinit mercy’.38 The intricate manipulation of her husband’s hair within the sheet may have helped Anna Maria to fulfill the bishop’s wishes, to better manage her grief, and to dedicate herself to God in similar fashion. Intricate embroidery of this kind has been widely acknowledged as an expression of piety, and the glistening strands of James Radcliffe’s golden hair that stood out against the plain cream linen perhaps offered consolatory thoughts of his near-angelic status in heaven. Anna Maria may have envisaged the hair-work as part of her own pathway to heavenly reward as well as a way to promote a bid for her husband’s sanctification. Her piety, and her patience, was certainly evidenced by the degree of time, labour and love that she invested in this memorial. The very process of embroidering this textile offered a way to eschew the trivialities of the material world, by imagining her husband’s spiritual reward, and to channel her feelings of loss. A letter from Lady Mary Radcliffe to Anna Maria made it clear that contemplating the earl’s status as a holy martyr had therapeutic value and offered a sure way to ‘mitigate our grief and turn our present Mourning into solid joy’.39 This sentiment was echoed by many of Anna Maria’s correspondents, who urged her to regard the earl’s sacrifice as a saintly act that had surely earned heavenly reward. These consolatory epistles no doubt also functioned as firm support for a broader campaign, supported by the countess and by figures in the wider Catholic community, to secure James Radcliffe’s status as a Catholic martyr.40 The earl’s spiritual fate, and his reputation on earth, was certainly uppermost in Anna Maria’s mind in the aftermath of his execution. Her letters show that she busied herself funding prayers and masses, and offering charitable bequests in her husband’s name, both in the British Isles and across Europe. The recipients of these funds assured the countess that her husband did not need their prayers but they would instead serve to enhance the glory of his sacred memory.41 Even more important than prayers and masses were the objects owned by, linked to, or taken from James Radcliffe’s body, which offered a practical means of constructing his saintly reputation. Clare Copeland’s careful dissection of the Catholic canonization process in seventeenth-century Europe indicates that campaigns for sanctity were complex and multi-layered. The deeds, reputations, relics and miracles associated with the virtuous dead, especially those recently deceased, were subject to intense scrutiny by the Congregation of Rites, an assembly of the Roman Curia established in 1588. Before a case for canonization could even be assessed, however, it first had to engage the interest of a local bishop who held the power to launch an inquiry. Informal devotional cults, with relics at their centre, thus played a critical role in the early stages of this process.42 Anna Maria’s efforts to promote James Radcliffe’s holy reputation in the aftermath of his execution may well have been intended to assuage her grief but also to nurture the kind of grassroots cult of devotion that was especially prevalent in Jacobite culture in the early decades of the eighteenth century.43 Historians who have noted the promotion of James Radcliffe’s sanctification cause have overlooked the critical momentum provided by the actions of his anguished widow. Articles of impeachment for high treason and a bill of attainder were brought against James Radcliffe, which meant that he forfeited all of his personal and real estates to the crown. His widow nevertheless acquired her husband’s black beaver hat, with the wig, black velvet suit, bloodied shirt, and shoes that he had worn on the scaffold, the golden crucifix that hung around his neck before it was severed, and a copy of a devotional guide, The Sinner’s Complaints to God (1707), written by Catholic priest and missionary John Goter. Radcliffe had used the guide to prepare his soul as he prayed and fasted in the Tower. Anna Maria no doubt consoled herself by communing with those objects that had touched her beloved husband’s body in his last months, days and hours. She went further, however, in arranging and adorning them with heartfelt inscriptions to establish their provenance. On the inside cover of The Sinner’s Complaints, she wrote: ‘This book my Dear Dear Lord made youse [sic] of in the Tower’.44 Between her husband’s death in 1716 and her arrival in Brussels in 1721, as the countess moved between Dagenham Park and her ancestral home at Hatherop in Gloucestershire, she gathered together the letters that James Radcliffe had written to family and friends before his execution. She carefully stored them and marked their provenance in her own hand.45 She passed the letter collection, and her husband’s personal effects, to her only daughter, Anna Maria Barbara, who married the horticulturist Lord Robert Petre in 1732, and they survive in the Petre family’s collection at Ingatestone Hall to this day. These treasured objects were not in the bequests named in the countess’s will: she may have given them to her daughter before her death, fearing that they might be seized by creditors if listed as formal bequests.46 Lady Petre clearly knew how much these objects meant to her mother, and the solemnity with which she herself regarded them was revealed by the signed testimony that she scribed in 1748. The document, which bears her black seal of mourning, reveals that she commissioned a handsome mahogany chest to contain her father’s effects. She charged her own children to use the chest for no other purpose unless a more handsome one should replace it. Her purpose in stating these wishes was to ensure that her father’s bodily traces, his relics, and his memory, would be treated with ‘respect and veneration’ by his descendants.47 Having secured a home for these treasured possessions, Anna Maria sought out reports of miracles linked to her husband’s remains. Henry Rodbourne, Anna Maria’s agent, was first to attest the supernatural power of James Radcliffe’s corpse.48 He wrote to the countess on 22 March 1716 to report that a young boy had been cured of the King’s Evil (scrofula) after touching the earl’s ‘blessed Corps’ at Roger Metcalfe’s house. Rodbourne’s account implicitly legitimized Radcliffe’s claim for veneration alongside previously martyred Stuart monarchs, since the power to cure the King’s Evil was believed to rest exclusively with those of royal descent. This power had seemingly passed to Radcliffe from his maternal grandfather, King Charles II. Alongside Henry Rodbourne, Bridget Canning from Clare Market was also ready to declare the healing powers of the blessed corpse, which had cured a violent pain in her arm.49 Roger Metcalfe’s home was the scene of a further miracle in 1719, when a Mr Shaftoe, who had been arrested with James Radcliffe at Preston, reclaimed his Catholic faith as he suffered with a deadly fever in Newgate prison. His wife Elizabeth attributed this conversion to the earl’s intercession after she had prayed over the corpse for heavenly assistance to save her husband’s soul.50 News of these miracles spread widely among the countess’s correspondents, no doubt with her encouragement, and she carefully preserved these reports, which added further support to her efforts to craft a holy reputation for her husband.51 Anna Maria thus went to considerable lengths to create lasting physical memorials of many different kinds, which honoured James Radcliffe’s memory and offered comfort and purpose in her mourning. The bed-sheet was probably intended to form the centrepiece of Anna Maria’s campaign to secure her husband’s sanctification. It was the object upon which she expended the most time, labour and imagination and in which she had invested her greatest treasure: the precious locks of her husband’s hair. She kept the sheet by her side until her death. She did not, however, choose to use it as her burial shroud, which strongly suggests that she envisaged a future life for it after her own premature death from smallpox in 1723. No mention of the sheet was made in Anna Maria’s will or in her surviving letters. Instead, the sheet’s condition hints that it was gifted to the nuns at St Monica’s convent who probably revered it as a holy relic. The name of James Radcliffe, third earl of Derwentwater, offered an important sense of lineage and a focus of spiritual devotion for the nuns at St Monica’s. Radcliffe was revered as the last of the English Catholic martyrs and he was described as a ‘devoted friend and benefactor’ of the convent in the official chronicle of its history.52 The Radcliffe family had long-established connections with St Monica’s, which was founded in 1609 by English members of the Flemish Augustinian convent St Ursula’s. They treasured the Derwentwater chasuble amongst their possessions, which was engraved with the Radcliffe coat of arms. The third earl had also gifted a fine set of silver-embroidered vestments to the convent, which remain in the order’s possession to this day.53 Radcliffe’s death, and the upkeep of his holy memory, thus complemented St Monica’s history and identity. The care of the earl’s bodily relics and the devotions that centred on them likely formed an important part of the nuns’ spiritual exercises, whilst ensuring that they were active participants in the wider Jacobite battle of resistance. The sheet’s condition suggests that it may well have been used in a devotional context. The lower border featuring the hair-work, love heart and white-work embroidery is noticeably different in shade than the rest of the textile, which indicates that it was exposed to indoor light rather than sunlight. The darker marks in this area are also consistent with the residue of burning candles.54 These marks suggest that the sheet may have been folded, with the lower portion on display, possibly in a frame, with candles surrounding it. This mode of exposure was consistent with the display of Thomas More’s hair-shirt at St Monica’s, which was brought to the convent by his adopted daughter Margaret Clement.55 If the sheet were displayed in this manner, it would have offered a highly visceral medium through which the nuns could contemplate the bloody sufferings and personal sacrifices of their peers in defence of the Catholic faith, and of the Stuart claim to the British throne. The hair inscription would intensify the emotions that the sheet triggered for those that gazed upon it. The radical translation of James Radcliffe’s hair from his living body onto a linen bed-sheet would naturally prompt thoughts of how it was taken from him, thus triggering recollections of his bloody sacrifice. In so doing, the sheet offered something quite distinct from Thomas More’s hair-shirt – the immediacy of the earl’s sacrifice was a timely reminder that these struggles were not just historical, but part of a live battle for religious and political restoration.56 The sheet’s embroidery thus transformed this seemingly ordinary household object into an active agent of memory, devotion and political resistance that intensified confessional divisions. As Claire Walker and Gabriel Glickman have shown, relics were crucial in shaping the devotions and identities of exiled convents because they represented a material touch-piece that transcended physical distance and connected the nuns to the wider Catholic community and to the Jacobite cause.57 James Radcliffe’s heart was the focus of worship for the Paris Augustinians who prayed for the earl as well as to him, for intercession. Anne Tyldesley, prioress of the convent, assured the countess in a letter of 23 October 1716 that she drew ‘comfort [and] a most beautiful succour’ from her proximity to this precious relic.58 She joined a chorus of people who had seen, touched or smelled the organ, who noted its wondrous lack of decay – indispensable for an authentic relic – in support of the campaign for the earl's sanctification.59 The heart’s reported vitality paralleled the shimmering animation of the earl’s hair, which would have served a similar purpose at St Monica’s. This bed-sheet may have been an atypical relic yet its spiritual resonance was acute. Venerating the sheet allowed the nuns to sanctify the earl’s memory, to support recognition of his martyrdom, and to contemplate the rewards that awaited those who sacrificed the most for their faith. ROMANTICIZING RADCLIFFE Little is known about how the bed-sheet left St Monica’s although it may have been removed from its resting place following the rejection of another King, as the nuns fled Louvain in 1794 to escape the approaching French revolutionary troops. This sudden upheaval created a troublesome gap in the sheet’s provenance as it simply disappeared from view until the early twentieth century. When the sheet resurfaced, mentioned in a letter of 22 June 1922, it was in the private possession of Walter Savage Landor of Kensington, no doubt a descendant of the controversial poet (1775–1864) who bore the same name. The poet Landor was obsessed with establishing a noble line of descent for his family and it is possible that he acquired the sheet as a family antiquity in memory of a Jacobite ancestor who took part in the 1715 rebellion.60 The sheet may have also been judged a shrewd investment as the now-defeated Jacobite cause became heavily romanticized and assumed heightened commercial appeal. In the nineteenth century, the tragic sacrifice made by the young and handsome James Radcliffe was lamented in a series of popular ballads and poems and in Sir Walter Scott’s tales of Scottish history, especially his best-selling novel Rob Roy (1817).61 James Radcliffe was firmly cast as a national hero, and his importance as a Catholic martyr was simultaneously revived by the journal The Royalist, which was the mouthpiece of the Order of the White Rose – a society that combined antiquarian interest in Jacobite relics and artefacts with the revival of Jacobitism’s political ambitions. In 1891 The Royalist published an article by Edmond Nolan entitled ‘The Heart of Lord Darwentwater’, which coincided with an investigation by the Order of the White Rose into the legitimacy of James Radcliffe’s claim to the title of ‘martyr’. In supporting his case, Nolan noted the ‘stimulating effects of possessing, or even beholding, the relics of our great men’. He made a special case for the sanctity of James Radcliffe’s relics in the face of commercial exploitation by ‘shrewd business men’ who traded in artificial relics to satisfy ‘zealous and indiscreet relic worshippers’.62 Nolan seemed well aware of the profit that could be made from Radcliffe’s authenticated remains, whether from prominent supporters of the neo-Jacobite cause, or from those in the earl’s native Northumberland who coveted his goods as part of the region’s turbulent history.63 In 1889 a heart-shaped silver and tortoiseshell snuff box that bore Radcliffe’s initials was auctioned at the ‘Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart’ at the New Gallery in Regent Street, alongside two engraved portraits of the earl. Radcliffe’s royal lineage, and his sacrifice, ensured that his relics here sat alongside the possessions of Stuart sovereigns including the martyred King Charles I.64 This auction had an important political as well as commercial purpose. It was intended to raise support for the neo-Jacobite restoration cause by highlighting the potency and durability of the movement’s physical remains, which had been carefully preserved by loyal supporters for more than two centuries.65 Displaying or possessing James Radcliffe’s relics, especially perhaps his glistening hair, offered a powerful way of reconnecting neo-Jacobites with the courage of the movement’s martyred heroes, which might strengthen their resolve to fight for their cause. Edmond Nolan extolled the power of James’s Radcliffe’s primary relics, which contained actual bodily traces of the holy martyr, for those who beheld them. Many of these primary relics, in Nolan’s estimation, also revealed ‘the highest ideal of love for his [Radcliffe’s] children, his wife, his country, his king, and his God’.66 James Radcliffe’s bed-sheet certainly did. It articulated the genealogy of Jacobite resistance for a new generation of political agitators, while its original function, as a bed-sheet, opened an emotional portal to the Radcliffes’ marriage. Between the forces of commemoration, political activism and commerce, the bed-sheet found a ready audience, being coveted as an agent of romantic nostalgia and as the politically resonant remains of a Jacobite hero.67 The bed-sheet’s renewed political appeal was accompanied by growing appreciation of its aesthetic qualities, which now extended beyond an explicitly devotional or political context. In the British Isles and North America, hair-work reached its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was carried out by professional practitioners and by skilful female amateurs, who drew on specialist manuals and design templates for inspiration and instruction.68 The practice and the category of hair-work was expansive in these years, with the latter encompassing braids, bracelets, brooches, chains, lockets, rings, and even pictures composed of human hair, some of which were displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851.69 Most surviving hair-work artefacts from the nineteenth century nonetheless involved weaving, plaiting or knotting hair, rather than sewing with it. The vibrant market for hair-work, and the rarity of the bed-sheet’s cross-stitched inscription, may well have broadened its commercial appeal to a new set of buyers who wished to admire or imitate its craftsmanship, rather than commemorate James Radcliffe’s death. In 1922, the bed-sheet’s owner, Walter Savage Landor, clearly perceived its combined educational and aesthetic potential. He wrote to Frederick Harman Oates, then Secretary to Guy Laking, first Keeper of the London Museum, and offered to lend the bed-sheet to the newly founded institution, which had previously issued a public appeal for donations.70 This offer was declined but the sheet was nonetheless exhibited in the same year at London’s Royal School of Needlework, probably as a fine example of white-work embroidery, which was an important precursor of needle lace, and as a rare early instance of hair-work embroidery for the instruction of the School’s female students. The School, established in 1872, aimed to revive the art of embroidery and to provide training for young women to advance their employment prospects. Seven years later, on Friday, 7 June 1929, the bed-sheet was the headline item in a textile auction at Sotheby’s, where the sales catalogue advertised it as a relic of the 1715 Jacobite rising that had been used in the Tower of London by James Radcliffe and inscribed by his widow. The sheet was still listed as the property of Savage Landor, although its sale may have followed his death. E. H. Benjamin, a London dealer in antique furniture and tapestries, purchased it for £32, and offered to sell it to the Museum of London in December 1929. The offer was declined but the sheet was purchased by the Museum in 1934 when it was offered for the third time by the interior decoration and antique dealers firm G. Jetley of South Audley Street, London. The Museum’s pattern of acquisitions at this time was eclectic, shaped by the collecting tastes of private benefactors, by ad hoc donations, and by targeted purchases that represented London’s history. The early collection had a strong focus on military artefacts, Stuart relics, textiles, and objects linked to London’s prisons. The bed-sheet complemented these collections but wealthy silk merchant Ernest Makower, who joined the Board of Trustees in 1930, may have also influenced its purchase when he donated Charles I’s execution vest to the Museum, along with a number of other Stuart relics.71 The political revival of Jacobitism in the nineteenth century combined with the new interest in hair-work to make the sheet the subject of romantic, aesthetic and educational interests, which allowed it to enter and operate within new emotional landscapes. CONCLUSION Today, the bed-sheet’s unusual materials and fine embroidery mainly attract those interested in the history of textiles. Its status and significance as a bed-sheet, at least in the early years of its life, have been of limited interest. The hair inscription, which guaranteed the sheet’s long-term survival, is the main reason that it has not been, and perhaps never will be, displayed in a public-facing exhibition, since sustained exposure to artificial light and unstable temperatures will damage this fragile artefact. The materials that once gave the sheet its emotional power have, paradoxically, created a barrier to its wider dissemination and to the everyday contexts that once gave it meaning. The history of this once ordinary linen bed-sheet nonetheless offers an unusual way of narrating the highs and lows of Jacobitism – from the violent intensity of armed rebellion, to the role played by grieving widows, exiled convents, and private collectors in sustaining, commemorating or exploiting the remnants of a fading cause, through to the movement’s absorption within the collective memory of British political history, as curated by the Museum of London. The sheet’s journey could thus be used to answer Alexandra Walsham’s call for historians to take greater note of the visceral materiality and durability of English Catholicism’s troubled history in the wake of the reformation – so often denigrated as ‘ephemeral’ – and the commanding role played by household objects, by women, and by emotions, in sustaining the faith of a dispersed and embattled religious community.72 The sheet was not simply an isolated repository of a widow’s grief but an object that shaped and reflected the affections, ambitions and actions of a broader transnational movement. The sheet’s journey also subverts a linear story of Jacobitism’s decline, revealing the different locations in which it continued to thrive and the range of materials, skills and agents that supported it. The circulation of corporeal relics that transported the blood, hair and tears of Jacobite martyrs and mourners forward in time was central to sustaining the religious sensibilities and political activism of the movement’s supporters in a long-term trajectory. Objects have an unparalleled capacity to condense the passage of time, and to establish the imminence of historical actors and historical moments in different temporal settings; they are both past and present. This attribute is especially compelling when objects feature life-like traces of a once-animate body, and it is crucial in explaining the survival and emotional power of this remarkable textile. This article set out, in part, to offer a methodological framework for integrating the study of objects within history of emotions scholarship. Before it can function as a guide of this kind, the bed-sheet’s exceptional nature must elicit a note of caution. The textile’s translation into a holy relic is not, of course, typical of the trajectories of similar household artefacts from this period. This alteration also ensured that the sheet’s history was unusually well provenanced by a range of narrative resources, which, in spite of the gap between 1794 and 1922, have allowed its biography to be partially constructed. The unusual micro-history nonetheless speaks to broader historical issues, most notably the powerful role that objects can and have played in eliciting, and in making visible, a range of entangled affective states across temporal boundaries. The bed-sheet’s creation and adaptation went hand-in-hand with the production and regulation of emotion for an assortment of individuals and groups in varied sets of historical circumstances. The sheet’s journey also offers a glimpse, albeit exceptional, of the latent emotionality that early modern bedding textiles could carry, which combined the discursive resonance of their base materials, the immersive and heavily personalized processes of making, and the daily routines that gave them meaning. The sheet, and its various alterations, discloses the feelings of comfort, intimacy and crisis associated with early modern bed-sheets, which protected the body’s boundaries from natural and supernatural threats. The use of linen was a commonplace and comforting material strategy to allay the feelings of danger that typically preceded bedtime and that simultaneously reveals the connections between bed-sheets, death and resurrection, which proved particularly apposite for the creation of a sacramental relic. The sheet was also intrinsically linked to performances of marital love and sexual pleasure – sensations that Anna Maria would surely have recollected during her immersive practice of adornment. Prolonged tactile interaction with the sheet that had last covered her husband’s body offered a practical way of triggering memories of happier times, of mastering her grief, and of promoting her husband’s reputation as a holy martyr. Its creation was, in other words, a substance-centred emotional practice: a series of bodily interactions with a specific set of materials that simultaneously constructed, eased and communicated a widow’s anguish.73 The addition of human hair made this evocative textile all the more resonant for those who touched it or gazed on it thereafter. The presence of the earl’s hair, which was a singular index of personal identity, secured the sheet’s provenance and transformed it into a storage box of memories and feelings that travelled far and wide. As the sheet changed hands, its materials orchestrated a different set of communal memories, emotions, and actions. James Radcliffe’s sacrifice, and the resistance of his golden hair to corruption, paralleled the wider Catholic community’s defiance of Protestant Hanoverian rule. The sheet’s dissonance was perhaps especially marked as its creation coincided with the ‘domestication’ of Protestantism within the everyday spaces and materials of early modern Europeans.74 The sheet’s creation, and its preservation over the course of three centuries, thus combined personal and collective acts of mourning, rebelling and remembering that were acutely embodied and affective in nature. Such visceral traces of the past make a strong case for a more purposeful interrogation of the making and meanings associated with ‘emotional objects’. These objects help to expose the entangled nature of historical emotions, the materials with which they could be assembled, and their capacity for transformation – things that are not discernible in textual sources alone.75 ID Number:  34.63  Section:  Costume  Object name:  sheet; bed sheet  Producer:  Derwentwater, Ann, countess of  Production Place:  England; Brussels?  Production Date:  1716–1730  Materials:  linen  Measurements:  L 2400mm; W 1820mm; W 900mm (selvedge to selvedge)1  ID Number:  34.63  Section:  Costume  Object name:  sheet; bed sheet  Producer:  Derwentwater, Ann, countess of  Production Place:  England; Brussels?  Production Date:  1716–1730  Materials:  linen  Measurements:  L 2400mm; W 1820mm; W 900mm (selvedge to selvedge)1  ID Number:  34.63  Section:  Costume  Object name:  sheet; bed sheet  Producer:  Derwentwater, Ann, countess of  Production Place:  England; Brussels?  Production Date:  1716–1730  Materials:  linen  Measurements:  L 2400mm; W 1820mm; W 900mm (selvedge to selvedge)1  ID Number:  34.63  Section:  Costume  Object name:  sheet; bed sheet  Producer:  Derwentwater, Ann, countess of  Production Place:  England; Brussels?  Production Date:  1716–1730  Materials:  linen  Measurements:  L 2400mm; W 1820mm; W 900mm (selvedge to selvedge)1  Sasha Handley is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester. Her interests lie in histories of supernatural belief, material culture, emotions and everyday life in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England. Her publications include Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (2007) and Sleep in Early Modern England (2016), shortlisted for the 2017 Wolfson History Prize and the Longman-History Today Book Prize. Sasha has held research fellowships from the AHRC, the British Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in 2016 with Dr Jenny Spinks she co-curated the exhibition Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World at Manchester’s John Rylands Library. Blog: www.historiesofsleep.com; Twitter: https://twitter.com/sashahandley. I would like, in particular, to thank my colleague Andrew Chamberlain for his generosity and expertise throughout this project. The advice of the Museum of London’s textile curators and conservators, Beatrice Behlen, Hilary Davidson and Melina Plottu, and of Susan North, curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has been invaluable. Matthew Martin, Angela McShane and Claire Walker provided essential advice when I presented this research at the ‘Art, Objects and Emotions’ collaboratory at the University of Melbourne in November 2016. I am grateful to Charles Zika and Angela Hesson for organizing this event, and for their critical input. Ian Atherton, Caroline Bowden, Alice Dolan, Paul Fouracre, Claire Marsland, Gareth Prosser, Tim Reinke-Williams, Sarah Ann Robin, Jenny Spinks, Penny Summerfield and Elaine Tierney have similarly provided vital insights. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 ‘Bed-sheet’ (c. 1716–30), Museum of London, Object No. 34.63. ‘Selvedge’ refers to the outer edge of each loom width of linen in the sheet. 2 John Styles, ‘What Were Cottons for in the Early Industrial Revolution’, in The Spinning World: a Global History of Cotton Textiles, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, Oxford, 2009. 3 On linen’s spiritual connotations see Veronica Sekules, ‘Spinning Yarns: Clean Linen and Domestic Values in Late Medieval French Culture’, in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación, New York and Basingstoke, 2002; Naya Tsentourou, Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at Prayer, Abingdon, 2017. 4 Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England, London, 2016, pp. 69–107. 5 David M. Mitchell, ‘“My purple will be too sad for that melancholy room”: Furnishings for Interiors in London and Paris, 1660–1735’, Textile History 40: 1 2009, p. 10. Alice Dolan, ‘“The Fabric of Life”: Time and Textiles in an Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Home’, Home Cultures 11: 3, 2014, pp. 353–74. 6 Sara Pennell, ‘“All but the Kitchen Sink”: Household Sales and the Circulation of Second-Hand Goods in Early Modern England’, in Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, ed. Jon Stobart and Ilja van Damme, London, 2010, pp. 37–56. 7 Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England, Philadelphia, 2010. On early modern women’s ‘emotional sewing’ see Bridget Long, ‘“Regular Progressive Work Occupies my Mind Best”: Needlework as a Source of Entertainment, Consolation and Reflection’, Textile 14: 2, 2016, pp. 176–87; Sarah Randles, ‘“The Pattern of All Patience”: Gender, Agency and Emotions in Embroidery Pattern Books in Early Modern England’, in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall, Basingstoke, 2015, pp. 150–67. 8 On materiality ‘as process’ see Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52: 4, 2001, p. 485. 9 Barry Schwartz, ‘Notes on the Sociology of Sleep’, in People in Places: the Sociology of the Familiar, ed. Arnold Birenbaum and Edward Sagarin, London, 1973; Eyal Ben-Ari, ‘“It’s Bedtime” in the World’s Urban Middle Classes: Children, Families and Sleep’, in Worlds of Sleep, ed. Lodewijk Brunt and Brigitte Steger, Berlin, 2008, p. 180. 10 Angela McShane and Joanne Bailey, ‘Making Beds, Making Households: the Domestic and Emotional Landscape of the Bed in early modern England’, pre-publication copy, 2017; Laura Gowing ‘“The Twinkling of a Bedstaff”: Recovering the Social Life of English Beds 1500–1700’, Home Cultures 11: 3, 2014, pp. 275–304. 11 Thanks to Joanne Bailey for drawing my attention to this connection. 12 William Sidney Gibson, Dilston Hall; or, memoirs of the Right Hon. James Radcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater, London, 1850, p. 90. 13 To achieve these results, three hair samples were taken from the reverse of the bed-sheet. They were compared with each other and with a modern specimen of human head hair in a Quanta 250 Field Emission Gun Scanning Electron Microscope. The microscopic examination and analysis of the results, were undertaken by the author and Andrew Chamberlain (Professor of Bioarchaeology). Thanks to the staff in the EM Core Facility in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, University of Manchester, for their assistance, and to the Wellcome Trust for equipment grant support to the EM Core Facility. I am grateful to Beatrice Behlen and Melina Plottu for assistance with the sampling. 14 The author examined over thirty portraits of James and Anna Maria at the Heinz Archive and Library and compared them with textual descriptions of the couple in Gibson, Dilston Hall, p. 37. 15 Sophia F.A. Caulfield and Blanche C. Saward, The Dictionary of Needlework: an encyclopaedia of artistic, plain, and fancy needlework, London, 1887, pp. 6, 172, 370. Mary M. Brooks, English Embroideries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, London, 2004, pp. 68–9. Margaret Swain, Ayrshire and other Whitework, Aylesbury, 1982, pp. 2–4. 16 ‘Account of Lord Derwentwater’s Death’, British Library Additional MS 34523, Mackintosh Collections 37, p. 9. 17 Claire Browne has identified three pieces of seventeenth-century hair-work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a fourth piece in a private collection: ‘Band of lace’, ca.1640–1680, Museum No. T.150-1963; ‘Band’, 1625–1675, Museum No. T.44-1962; ‘Band of lace’, 1640–1680, Museum No. T.265-1927. A muslin and cotton apron, with the initials ‘S.W.’ and date ‘1774’ embroidered with human hair, is also in the museum’s collections and appears to serve a similar memorial function to the bed-sheet: ‘Apron’, 1774, Museum No. T.105-1961. For examples of hair within embroidery textiles see Brooks, English Embroideries, pp. 48–9. 18 Evelyn Welch, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies 23: 3, 2008, pp. 243, 251, 256; Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: a Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 306. 19 Dictionary of Needlework, p. 171. Hair was central to the canonization campaign for Maria Clementina, wife of the Old Pretender, which was sent to his followers and linked to miracle reports: Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites, Cambridge, 2013, p. 117. 20 Sarah Ann Robin, ‘Posies, Pictures and Promises: Love and the object: the English in the Seventeenth Century’, PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, 2016, pp. 200–51. 21 Marcia Pointon, ‘“These Fragments I have Shored against my Ruins”’, in The Story of Time, ed. Kristen Lippincott with Umberto Eco, E. H. Gombrich and others, London, 1999, pp. 297, 300. 22 John Donne, Poems, by J. D. With elegies on the authors death, London, 1633, pp. 289–290. 23 Pointon, “These Fragments”, p. 293. 24 Daniel Turner, De morbis cutaneis. A treatise of diseases incident to the skin, London, 1714, pp. 104, 130–1; Anu Korhonen, ‘Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 41: 2, 2010, pp. 371–91. On bodily materiality, humoralism and emotion see Ulinka Rublack, ‘Fluxes: the Early Modern Body and the Emotions’, History Workshop Journal 53, 2002, pp. 1–16. 25 On hair growth and loss as materializations of masculinity see Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 54: 1, 2001, pp. 155–87. 26 Pointon, Brilliant Effects, p. 306. 27 Jane Cornwallis, The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis, 1613–1644, ed. Lord Braybrooke, London, 1842, pp. 88–9; Robert Bartlett, ‘Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 4, 1994, p. 53. 28 Stefan Hanβ, ‘Face-Work: Making Hair Matter in Sixteenth-Century Central Europe’, in Das Haar als Argument: Zur Wissensgeschichte von Bärten, Frisuren und Perücken, ed. Martin Mulsow, forthcoming, 2017. Stefan Hanβ, ‘Hair, Emotions and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, article in preparation, 2017. 29 An estimate from 1850 suggests the earl’s estates earned an annual net income of £44,000: ‘The Derwentwater Relics at Ushaw’, The Ushaw Magazine, December 1909, p. 268. 30 See, for example, The New Practice of Piety: containing the necessary duties of a Christian Life, London, 1749, p. 158. 31 For an in-depth account of the material and conceptual relationship between beds, death and spiritual devotions see Handley, Sleep, pp. 69–107. 32 ‘Note from James Radcliffe to his wife Maria’, 1716, Essex County Record Office (hereafter ECRO), D/DP F273/3. 33 ‘Letter from Rev. Geo. Pippard to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 18 Sept. 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/15. 34 ‘Letter from Lady Elizabeth Radcliffe to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 17 Aug. 1718, ECRO D/DP F273/23. 35 Metcalfe was from a family of Yorkshire recusants and educated at the English Jesuit College at St Omer. ‘Letter from Roger Metcalfe to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 20 June 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/29. ‘Manuscript transcript’, Ushaw College (hereafter UC) UC/P30/71, p. 4. 36 Frances Rogers, a lay sister at St Monica’s convent in Louvain, offered the countess ‘a thousand thanks for the dear hair’: ‘Letter from F. Rogers to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 11 June 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/24; ‘Will of Anna Maria Countess of Darwentwater, Dowager of Brussels in Flanders’, 27 May 1734, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), PROB 11/665/220. 37 Guthrie, Material Culture of the Jacobites, p. 41. On the parallels between James Radcliffe’s commemoration and the veneration of James II see Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology, Woodbridge, 2009, p. 98. 38 ‘Letter from Bishop Giffard to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 21 Feb. 1717, ECRO D/DP F273/13. George Pippard encouraged the countess to moderate her grief in similar fashion: ‘Letter from Rev. Geo Pippard’. 39 ‘Letter from Lady Mary Radcliffe to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/22. 40 Substantial support for James Radcliffe’s sanctification is indicated by the dissemination of a formal account of his death to Rome by the Benedictines of St Edmund’s in Douai, and by the dispatch of a polemical prayer to the English College at Rome, which named him as a ‘holy martyr’. Cited in Glickman, English Catholic Community, pp. 173, 199. 41 ‘Letter from Anne Tyl[desley] to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 23 Oct. 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/30; ‘Letter from M. Pritchard to the Right Honble Lady Derwentwater’, 9 Jan. 1718, ECRO F273/32; ‘Letter from Rev. G. Pippard to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 14 Feb. 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/14. 42 For an overview of the Catholic Church’s rigorous canonization process in seventeenth-century Europe see Clare Copeland, Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi: the Making of a Counter-Reformation Saint, Oxford, 2016, pp. 9–12, 15–17, 103–41. 43 Matthew Martin argues persuasively that supporters of King James II fostered a lively cult of bodily relics within Jacobite culture after his death in 1701: Matthew Martin, ‘Infinite Bodies: The Baroque, the Counter-reformation Relic and the Body of James II’, article in preparation, November 2016. 44 Kind thanks to Lord Petre who allowed me a private view of the prayer book and clothing of James Radcliffe, on display at Ingatestone Hall, Essex. 45 ‘The Bishops Letter to my Dear Dear Lord’, 20 Feb. 1716, ECRO D/DP 273/10; ‘My Dear Dear Lords letter to my Lady Mary Radclyfe’, 1716, ECRO D/DP 273/8; ‘My Dear Dear Lords Letter to my Brother Charls’, post 23 Feb. 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/7; ‘A Copy of my Dear Dear Lords letter to my Father and Mother’, 23 Feb. 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/6; A coppy of my dear dear Lords letter to his mother’, 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/5; ‘My Dear Dear Lords letter to me’, 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/2; ‘Some few lines of my Dear Dear Lords’, 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/3 and 4. 46 The countess had outstanding debts when she wrote her will in 1723 due to the seizure of her husband’s estates. She relied on her father, Sir John Webb, for maintenance whilst in exile: ‘Will of Anna Maria Countess of Darwentwater’. 47 ‘Certificate of Anna Maria Barbara Lady Petre’, ECRO D/DP/F274 (1748). 48 On the network of Catholic agents at work in Europe at this time, see Glickman, English Catholic Community, p. 91. 49 ‘Letter from Henry Rodbourne to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 22 March 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/28. 50 ‘Letter from Eliza. Shaftoe to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 2 July 1719, D/DP F273/36. 51 ‘Letter from F. Rogers’. Further conversions wrought by the earl’s sacrifice were detailed in ‘Letter from Bishop Giffard’. 52 The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain (Now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon), A Continuation 1625 to 1644, ed. Dom Adam Hamilton, O.S.B., 2 vols, Edinburgh and London, 1906, vol. 2, p. viii. 53 In 1882 the Priory sent the earl’s vestments for display at the Worcestershire Exhibition as fine examples of raised silver embroidery. The exhibition, which ran from 18 July to 18 October, attracted nearly 250,000 visitors: Official Catalogue: Worcestershire Exhibition, 1882, Worcester, 1882, p. 126. 54 Thanks to Andrew Chamberlain for identifying these marks on a visit to the Museum of London. 55 Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses, p. 3. 56 For a persuasive account of political agitation for a Stuart restoration amongst English Catholics at home and in exile in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Glickman, The English Catholic Community. 57 Claire Walker, ‘“When God shall Restore them to their Kingdoms”: Nuns, Exiled Stuarts and English Catholic Identity, 1688–1745’, in Religion and Women in Britain, c.1660–1760, ed. Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith, Farnham, 2014, pp. 85–7, 97. Glickman, English Catholic Community, pp. 199–202. 58 ‘Letter from E. Davis to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 7 Nov. 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/31; ‘Letter from Anne Tyl’. 59 ‘The Surgeon, Roger Metcalfe, to the Countess of Derwentwater’, 20 June 1716, ECRO D/DP F273/29; ‘Letter from Anne Tyl’; ‘Letter from George Pippard’, ECRO D/DP F273/20. Evidence of agitation for James Radcliffe’s sanctification is further supported by the wide dispersal of his body parts, particularly in the form of execution relics, which were also listed amongst the convent communities at Harrow on the Hill, Lanherne and Uttoxeter. Thanks to Dr Tim Hopkinson-Ball for uncovering these references in Bede Camm, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sacred Relics of the Post-Reformation Martyrs in England which are Still Preserved in Catholic Hands, MS Erdington, 1901, Downside Abbey Library, B204A, pp. 12, 62, 222. Thanks to Claire Walker for sharing her preliminary investigation of the Lanherne relics with me, which contain blood stains and bone fragments attributed to James Radcliffe. Jan Graffius has identified a piece of blood-stained cloth said to be that of James Radcliffe in the collections of Stonyhurst College, which holds the relics formerly kept at the English Jesuit College at St Omer: Jan Graffius, ‘The Stuart Relics in the Stonyhurst Collections’, Recusant History 31: 2, 2012, pp. 147–69. An additional piece of stained cloth attributed to James Radcliffe is held at Sizergh Castle in Cumbria, formerly the home of the Jacobite Strickland family who built up a large relic collection in the early eighteenth century. The defining qualities of relics, and their connections to the formation of memory and identity, are examined in Alexandra Walsham, ‘Introduction: Relics and Remains’, Past and Present Supplement 5, 2010, pp. 9–36. 60 Sidney Colvin, Landor (1881), Cambridge, 2011, pp. 4–5; John Forster, Walter Savage Landor: a Biography, 2 vols, London, 1869, vol. 1, p. 9. 61 ‘An Aerostick on the right honourable James Earl of Derwentwater’, 23 Oct. 1895, Townsley MSS, UC/P36a; Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 67–8; ‘To the pious and Immortal memory of the R. Honble James Earl of Derwintwater, who was beheaded on Tower Hill February 24th 1715.6’, ECRO D/DP F277; Vladimir Jankovic, ‘The Politics of Sky Battles in early Hanoverian Britain’, Journal of British Studies 41: 4, 2002, pp. 429–59. 62 Manuscript transcript of an article by Edmond Nolan entitled ‘The Heart of Lord Darwentwater’, 30 Jan. 1893, UC/P30/71, p. 1. 63 When Radcliffe’s coffin at Dilston Chapel was opened in 1805, some of his teeth were stolen and sold by a local blacksmith, whilst an inhabitant of nearby Hexham procured one as a cure for toothache: ‘Letter from Mary Agnes to Lord Petre’, October 1875, ECRO D/DP F285; Gibson, Dilston Hall, p. 166; ‘The Derwentwater Relics at Ushaw’, The Ushaw Magazine, pp. 267–75; ‘Manuscript transcript’, UC/P30/71; Samuel Pool, ‘Letter to Delaval House’, 13 Jan. 1893, UC/P30/71; ‘Nail Cloth and Lace taken from Lord Derwentwater’s Coffin in 1805’, UC/P30/71. 64 Exhibition of the Royal House of Stuart. The New Gallery, Regent Street, London, 1889, pp. 104, 140, 143. 65 Guthrie, Material Culture of the Jacobites, pp. 156–7. A second exhibition took place at the Guildhall, Cambridge in May 1911: Exhibition of Stuart and Cromwellian Relics: And Articles of Interest Connected with the Stuart Period, Cambridge, 1911. 66 ‘The heart of Lord Derwentwater’, UC/P30/71. 67 On collecting as an act of political resistance see Thomas Stammers, ‘Collectors, Catholics, and the Commune: Heritage and Counterrevolution, 1860–1890’, French Historical Studies 37: 1, 2014, pp. 53–87. 68 Mark Campbell, Self-instructor in the art of hair work, New York and Chicago, 1867; Elegant Arts for Ladies, London, 1856; Cassell’s Household Guide: being a complete encyclopaedia of domestic and social economy, 4 vols, London, 1869–71. 69 Charlotte Gere, Victorian Jewellery Design, London, 1972, p. 251. Deirdre O’Day, Victorian Jewellery, London, 1974, pp. 36–7. 70 W. S. Landor, ‘Children in Museums’, The Times, Wednesday, 10 Jan. 1923, Issue 43235, p. 6. In this letter to the editor, Landor expressed his belief in free access to national collections ‘for the purpose of study’. 71 Francis H. W. Sheppard, The Treasury of London’s Past: an historical account of the Museum of London and its predecessors, the Guildhall Museum and the London Museum, London, 1991, p. 105. 72 Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Pope’s Merchandise and the Jesuits’ Trumpery: Catholic Relics and Protestant Polemic in post-Reformation England’, in Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger, Leiden, 2015, pp. 370–409. On the role of household objects in structuring Protestant and Catholic devotional cultures see Mary Laven, ‘Devotional Objects’, in Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Victoria Avery, Melissa Calaresu and Mary Laven, London, 2015, pp. 238–44. 73 On emotions as practice see Monique Scheer, ‘Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion’, History and Theory 51: 2, 2012, pp. 193–220. On the emotional context of making and using textiles from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, see the Special Issue ‘Emotional Textiles’, ed. Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway, Textile: Cloth and Culture, 14: 2, 2016. 74 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 69: 2, 2016, pp. 566–616. Tara Hamling, ‘Old Robert’s Girdle: Visual and Material Props for Protestant Piety in Post-Reformation England’, in Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, Abingdon, 2012, pp. 135–64. 75 Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History, ed. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway and Sarah Randles, Oxford, 2017, will be an agenda-setting volume for those working at the intersection of objects and emotions in pre-modern culture. Two international research collaborations similarly seek to make advances in this field. They are ‘Objects and Emotions: Rituals, Routines, Collections and Communities’, University of Manchester and University of Melbourne, https://historiesofemotion.com/2017/04/07/objects-and-emotions-rituals-routines-collections-and-communities/, and ‘Materialized Identities: Objects, Affects and Effects in Early Modern Culture 1450–1750’, University of Basel, University of Bern and University of Cambridge, https://www.materializedidentities.com/project (both accessed 20 April 2017). © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Caplan, Jane;Khan, Yasmin

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dby010pmid: N/A

We didn’t set out to have a theme; this is a pick-and-mix volume, filled with a wide array of subjects, regions and approaches, from the intricacies of a local fray between assailants in sixteenth-century Weymouth to a utopian experiment in communal living in early twentieth-century Japan: a History Workshop smorgasbord of different regions and historical characters. Yet as we set ourselves to editing, one theme clearly emerged in a number of the articles. The things – particularly personal and household possessions – which people have kept close to them in the past, and the ways in which such possessions can help us to reconstruct histories and meanings in the present. This is most explicitly (in more than one sense) set out in Caspar Meyer’s article on Greek vases. He takes ‘the side-lining of materiality in historical writing’ as a direct target, and explains how the study of Greek sexuality suffers in important ways from a lack of attention to the materiality of its evidence. The images on the vases have been too readily harnessed to discourse. These ceramic objects – which were, after all, ordinary household items – need to be seen, handled and examined in all their three-dimensionality, he argues, before we start theorizing about Greek sexuality. These vases are featured prominently, if in only two dimensions, on Bernard Canavan’s wonderfully bold cover. The contingencies of survival from the past are striking. An aristocrat’s notebooks were more likely to survive flood, fire or cleaning than those of a shopkeeper or farmer, as Brodie Waddell points out. This makes the forty years’ worth of old almanacs scribbled in between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries by William Bufton, an Essex tradesman, not only a remarkable written source, but also a valuable material survival. These were more than just ego-documents: as Waddell points out, the possession and storage of a collection of such notebooks was a social and political act. Other things have survived in even more random and contingent ways. Ceri Houlbrook introduces us to ‘concealed deposits’ – objects from old shoes to animal remains, stuffed into chimneybreasts or buried under floorboards, that appear to have been deliberately concealed ‘for no obviously practical purpose and probably with no intention of retrieval’. Whatever the original purposes, the twenty-first century finders of these objects endow them with all kinds of imagined meanings – even superstitious and magical properties that may be quite different from the original owner’s relationship to these items. As Sasha Handley writes in her article, ‘objects have an unparalleled capacity to condense the passage of time’ and their visceral, sometimes bloody and bodily properties, can evoke grief, love and pain. Of course, we should not presume that things are familiar to us, or that they had the same meaning to people in the past. Nor are objects innocent bystanders to the past. In many of the articles there are things which shape-shift, or are used in ways that could not have been anticipated. Handley’s example of an early modern bedsheet, embroidered with the entwined hair of the countess of Derwentwater and her husband James Radcliffe, is a startling instance. Radcliffe was beheaded on Tower Hill for his role in the Jacobin uprising of 1715 and his wife’s embroidery was both a personal token of mourning and also an important act of religious and community expression. This ostensibly mundane object is saturated with profound meanings, which Handley guides us to decode. Things can also be weapons, used to inflict pain and death. An unfamiliar object in this volume is a cowl-staff that was used to inflict a mortal injury on an opponent during a brawl in a Dorset town in 1534. This was a long stick with a hook on the end, normally used for carrying a basket – ‘a work tool, albeit one that could be used offensively’, as Jonathan Healey writes in his article about this fight. He goes on to show how a detailed dissection of the petty affray in which it was used to such deadly purpose can reveal much about the making of the early modern state and the regulation of the King’s Peace. Other things were designed very intentionally to cause the maximum harm and damage – most chillingly, the expanding dum-dum bullet (1896), developed in Britain’s imperial campaigns, championed by Churchill, and modelled on bullets used to hunt rhinos and tigers. Kim Wagner incorporates a close reading of the dum-dum bullet into his analysis of military violence in an imperial setting at the end of the nineteenth century. Some articles in this volume are not directly concerned with material culture as such, but do show historians working with an open eye for the things around them, not just the words in archives. In ‘Pommy Town’, the Lysaght workers’ estate in Australia which was built by a big iron and steel firm for workers brought from their British mills, Helen Macallan observed the house of one of her interviewees: ‘The kitchen housed yet another astonishing collection of all things English – copper pans on the walls, tea towels with images of thatched cottages and a corner taken over by stacks of old English magazines’. This is a telling metaphor for the resident’s relationship with an imagined and distant past and homeland. Britishness at home and Britishness abroad is another accidental but not unexpected theme in this issue. Becky Taylor’s article makes an important contribution to the understanding of Britain’s reception of Ugandan refugees at the Greenham Common Camp in the 1970s. The camp volunteers had divergent views on race, empire and caring for the refugees, and Taylor paints a picture of Britain on the cusp of change, riven with generational fault lines. Our accidental theme – the objects of history – may tell us about the direction of history-writing more generally at the moment, as historians engage with the past in all its material, physical and tangible aspects. Everyday things in all their ephemeral variety have long been objects of conservation and fascination in the static displays of museums. Publications like Neil MacGregor’s best-selling History of the World in 100 Objects (originally broadcast on Radio 4 in weekly episodes during 2010) and projects like the Oxford Ashmolean Museum’s podcast series ‘Thinking with Things’ have escaped the museum walls and given voices to mute objects. The essays in this issue of History Workshop Journal not only offer similar acts of interpretation, but also cast light on the historicity of things that can too easily be overlooked by virtue of their omnipresence. But perhaps this interest is also a symptom of materialism itself, of a contemporary world where so many are defined by what they own, where things have a life of their own, where in the West we are all overwhelmed by a glut of stuff. Taking up the tangible possessions of the past, and really looking at them, is a way to think about the disposability of the present and the accidents of preservation. This vision also chimes with History Workshop’s core belief in the accessibility of the past, the way it can be written from the stuff of everyday life and ordinary places, just as much as from the rarefied environment of the archive. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Macallan, Helen

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dby003pmid: N/A

Abstract In 1921 the English iron and steel manufacturer, John Lysaght Ltd, opened mills in East Mayfield, Newcastle, Australia. The company built a housing estate adjacent to the works to accommodate the seventy-five men (and their families) brought from Bristol and Newport to operate the new works. The focus of this essay is on the myths, memories and lived experiences of the residents of the former estate, who were poorly received, not least because they arrived at a time of acute job and housing shortage. Thus, the estate was dubbed ‘Pommy Town’, a negative label denoting it as English despite the fact that more than half the residents were Welsh, and the speech and habits of the newcomers were regarded as suspiciously ‘foreign’. The essay offers a portrait of the social dynamics of an Australian industrial city in the first half of the twentieth century. It seeks to recall the lives of industrial workers and their families, figures increasingly not given their due in a post-industrial age. I make my maps because soon the twentieth century will be over and there will be nobody left who will remember these things. William R. Claridge, Mayfield, 19991 Even in an era of outcome-oriented research, there is still the chance that one’s progress towards an identified goal can take a detour along the way. This was the case when as chief investigator for a research project I set off in pursuit of an object that did not figure in my original proposal. The Pommy Town Project was set up in 1998 to investigate a workers’ housing estate established in 1921 by the English corrugated-iron manufacturer John Lysaght Limited. The object sought was a panorama, a composite photograph frequently referred to by the people we interviewed which was said to give a unique overview of the estate’s surroundings in the late 1920s. The quest for this opened up my perspective on a specific period in Newcastle’s history and thus brought an unanticipated dimension to the project as a whole. The estate was built in East Mayfield, an industrial and working-class suburb of Newcastle, New South Wales. It comprised a chapel, a community hall, and seventy-five identical brick houses for the skilled steel workers (and their families) brought from England and Wales to operate the company’s new mills.2 The Lysaght venture was part of the postwar retreat by British companies and investors ‘behind the walls of the empire’, a retreat that involved ‘the relocation of entire sections of industry to Australian bases’.3 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Aerial view of the former Lysaght Estate and industrial surrounds on the eve of BHP’s Newcastle closure (1999). Photo: Alan Chawner. Author’s collection. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Aerial view of the former Lysaght Estate and industrial surrounds on the eve of BHP’s Newcastle closure (1999). Photo: Alan Chawner. Author’s collection. Despite all the new industry, in twentieth-century Australia an estate built specifically for migrant labour was the exception rather than the rule, and the general concept of workers’ estates had little support.4 A 1913 New South Wales (NSW) government report on housing for workers noted the ‘land famine’ in Australian cities and the consequent practice of ‘land sweating’ (the overcrowding of housing in industrial areas). It concluded that the primary concern of the private sector was to exact profit from the situation and that there appeared to be no concern for ‘the consequences to the nation as a whole’.5 A NSW Inquiry related to housing two years later gives weight to these comments. Responding to questions about the demand for cottages for working men, a spokesperson for the Newcastle operations of the Australian mining and steel-producing firm Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) acknowledged that there was already a crisis in Newcastle and that the company’s wage structure was inadequate to high rental costs. He also agreed that the situation would worsen with the anticipated doubling of BHP’s output within the next five years. However, he was clear that the company did not view the situation as its responsibility, ‘We do not think that the provision of houses for workmen by the company is good policy’.6 The financial record of the Australian Lysaght estate however suggests that such projects could be commercially viable. According to company historian Peter Richards: ‘Over the years and after annual outgoings, this investment actually returned 3.1% on capital outlayed’.7 But the situation was complex. For instance, the labour activist F. J. Riley opposed the practice of ‘industrial welfare’, warning that charity from employers should be regarded with suspicion. He viewed it as diverting workers’ attention from the real issues at stake.8 The John Lysaght firm was established in Bristol in 1857, in the industrial and working-class district of St Philips. It became a significant producer of galvanized iron and in 1898 mills were also set up in Newport, Wales. The ‘black’ sheet was manufactured in Newport and then carried by barge a short distance across the Severn to be galvanized in Bristol. The proximity of the two operations permitted easy transport of products between the mills and also further afield. In 1880 the company set up an agency in Victoria and began exporting to Australia.9 Lysaght bought the Mayfield site, twenty-four acres beside the Hunter River, in early 1915. In 1919 the company exchanged this lot with one held by BHP which was the same size and lay alongside the river. Lysaght opened its Springhill mills in Port Kembla in NSW in 1934. These were the only Lysaght mills in Australia although both underwent enormous expansion in the 1940s and 1950s.10 The Australian estate had a precedent back in Newport. Many of the Welsh migrants had previously lived on the Lysaght estate there, colloquially known as ‘little Staffordshire’ because a sizeable proportion of its residents had come from the Black Country when Lysaght closed its Wolverhampton steel mills in 1901.11 The estate in Newcastle was known to its residents as ‘the village’ but from the start Newcastle citizens (‘Novocastrians’) dubbed it ‘Pommy Town’ because of the newcomers’ British origins. The popular designation of the suburban estate as a ‘village’ or ‘town’ seems to have stemmed from its perceived self-sufficiency and its communal amenities. Its location on the fringe of Newcastle, close by a dairy farm and open land, also gave it a kind of liminal character, between city and country, which historian Paul Ashton describes as creating a ‘village atmosphere’.12 By the end of the twentieth century, the estate houses, which were typical examples of the popular 1920s Australian brick bungalow, had been superficially individualized but otherwise remained virtually intact. A handful were still inhabited by elderly people who had migrated with their parents as children. Our research involved collecting and documenting the myths, memories and lived experiences of the residents of the former estate along with Novocastrians of the same generation. David Carr’s formulation, that ‘a community exists where a narrative account exists of a we which persists through experience and actions’, provides a useful approach to the complex interweaving of individual, family and collective memories and insight into the overwhelming dominance of the use of the first-person plural (‘we’) in the stories of those who had lived on the estate.13 While everyone had their own idiosyncratic memories, and these sometimes worked to contest rather than confirm each other, there were also seemingly endless entry points into the collective memory of the community. The accounts of the area in the 1920s produced in their own right a strong sense of place, but I quickly became aware of a collective fretting about the unknown fate of the panorama. Copies were said to have once been possessed by former residents of the estate who had died. Our quest for it stemmed initially from the scholarly intent to turn memory into history. It gained urgency from a sense of responsibility towards interviewees for whom it seemed to represent an irrefutable record of a past which they feared would be erased from the city’s memory after they died. However, as time went by, the search for evidence gave way to an unabashed curiosity, simply the desire to see for myself a photograph of the places that were so affectionately described. After many false leads, there was a promising one. Someone was reported to have given the panorama to the steel-tube manufacturers, Stewarts and Lloyds, because it showed the original site of the company as a Chinese market garden.14 Our informant was sure that it would be found gracing the manager’s office of Tubemakers, the firm occupying the site. But although their Human Resources officer (in another life an engineer with Stewarts and Lloyds) had no memory of it, he suggested that we search their inherited collection of photographs and documents. Thus the project photographer Alan Chawner and I found ourselves in the huge bunker-like basement of the building that had once been Stewarts and Lloyds’ headquarters and where we faced a daunting task. Flickering fluorescent lights revealed saucers of rat poison scattered among a mountain of debris from over seventy years of the firm’s history. Here a board with tacked-on photographs of former captains of industry, their names typed clumsily underneath – a reminder of the pre-digital age of the amateur when everything looked like a school project; there a huge dusty but handsome album, page after page displaying industrial machinery, each black-and-white composition given the dignity of a still life, but all in the era of deindustrialization appearing like fantastic Dadaist useless machines. At the end of the day when we were about to leave disappointed, the HR manager took us outside: ‘Look at the roof of this building’, he said, ‘What do you see?’ Alan remarked that it looked as if they had run out of tiles because there were pale tiles scattered among the deeper red ones. ‘No’, he said. Stewarts and Lloyds in 1934 had wanted the roof being constructed to evoke the appearance of wintry roofs in Scotland. The pale tiles represented falling snow and the intention was to produce a sense of home for the Scottish migrants who were the basis of their workforce. This explanation does not hold up, however. Although the firm was Scottish, as were the managing director, some management personnel and a few workers skilled in tube-making, the bulk of the workforce was Australian. In an odd conflation of work and personal identity, however, the company’s workers were spoken of as Scottish. The anecdote surfaced in 1999, a time of crisis in Newcastle. BHP, the major steel-producing firm in the town since 1914, which over the second half of the twentieth century had cannibalized most of its local competitors including Lysaght, was about to close its Newcastle operations and become a global company.15 That fable told how a firm had attempted to assuage the homesickness of those arriving at work in a strange new country through recognition of the geographical environment as part of the condition of belonging, in a kind of architectural psychology.16 The history and closure of BHP was similarly recounted as a story about the particular relationship between employer and employee in the days of the family firm. The prevailing notion in Newcastle that family firms survived for longer than in fact they did was probably related to the relatively uneventful nature of the take-overs that preceded the major global shifts in the 1990s. In the case of Lysaght, the company’s history was imbricated with that of BHP from 1919 when the companies signed joint land deals. By 1929 BHP had a large stake in Lysaght, which became a public company in 1961 and was fully taken over by BHP in 1979.17 The misconception that it remained under private ownership was probably related to the continuity from the late nineteenth century to the end of the 1980s of Lysaght family members as active participants in the company – first as owners, then as employees.18 HOMESICKNESS AND HOSTILITY The story of the tiles begs questions of responsibility and paternalism. True or not, it offers a contrast with the distanced relationship and absence of playfulness between worker and employer at work today (IT companies perhaps excluded). It suggests the employers recognized that their workers felt out of place in this country with its summer heat waves and its soil inimical to the bluebell, the snowdrop, and those other flowers that signal the unmistakable change of seasons in a northern climate. Descriptions of the early years in Pommy Town often included memories of parental adjustment to life in a new country and constant reminders of the material effects as well as the spatial dimensions of homesickness, as families were split and stranded on either side of the world. In Newport, an elderly couple, Gladys and Ernest Heath, recalled the distress it caused the older generation whose children had migrated, not the least because suddenly they were without their customary practical support – ‘Gran kept pigs and they used to help her with them’. And the distance between Britain and Australia was a constant theme, one sometimes expressed humorously: Oh aye, Uncle Charlie told me Australia was at the far end of the world. He promised he’d be sending a present but it would take a long time to arrive. He said, ‘See that the rabbit comes through the hole – I’ll push one through!’19 Bertrand (Bertie) Gibbs who came out to Australia as a four-year-old blamed the beginnings of his mother’s catastrophic change from a cheerful person into ‘a shadow of her former self’ on the distance of Australia from England and the terrible Australian climate. Her homesickness had begun with her increasing sense of desolation on the journey out, when each day the distance from England was posted in the ship’s bulletin. Then, not long after their arrival, she was bitten by a mosquito while walking on the swampy golf links one hot summer’s night, and the seemingly trivial event resulted in an ulcer which was to give her health problems for the rest of her life. Shortly before his sudden death, we interviewed Bertie in his estate cottage, which was completely secluded from the street by trees and shrubs, and in which he had become a virtual recluse.20 ‘Welcome to little England’, he said, as we tried to find a place to put the camera. It seemed as if he had externalized his mother’s homesickness through a lifetime of collecting that had begun when he got his first pay packet from Lysaght. His Aladdin’s cave of a ‘parlour’ was crammed with mementoes of an England of another time – Toby jugs, crystal vases, copper knick-knacks, ornamental china plates and Constable prints of landscapes – all softly lit by a standard lamp with a shade depicting an English country church and its leafy surrounding. In the kitchen (Fig. 2) Bertie tapped a teapot – ‘English bone china’ – and then an old but unscratched yellow biscuit tin, on whose lid heavily embossed red lettering read ‘Huntley and Palmers’ (‘Don’t talk to me about Arnott’s!’)21 The kitchen housed yet another astonishing collection of all things English – copper pans on the walls, tea towels with images of thatched cottages and a corner taken over by stacks of old English magazines. Yet despite a lifetime of longing for Home, for the cobbled streets and bracing climate of Bristol, Bertie regarded the finding of the panorama of the estate and its surrounding as of the utmost importance, likening it to his wooden jigsaw of England’s counties. ‘It’s the way things fit together that lets you understand how the whole thing works.’ While the story of Bertie Gibbs’s mother and its melancholic aftermath, his sense of estrangement from the culture in which the greater part of his life was spent, was at the far, perhaps pathological, end of the scale of homesickness, most of those interviewed reported their parents’ (especially their mothers’) sense of loss and alienation as they attempted to come to terms with their new lives in Australia. In its report on the departure of the Bristol contingent (‘Off to Australia’) the local Lysaght Bulletin commented that the grief of those who left relations behind was alleviated by the ‘vision of glorious opportunity such as an industry offers in a virgin land’ and emphasized Lysaght’s generosity as an employer.22 The company mantra was that the houses were constructed of ‘solid brick’ and reports in the media emphasized the modernity of the estate, the Newcastle Sun enthusiastically noting that it was the ‘nucleus of an Australian Port Sunlight’ while the Sydney Mail claimed the houses were ‘sewered wherever possible’.23 The reality was somewhat different. In January 1919 Lysaght had signed a contract with BHP that involved the company receiving a secure supply of steel sheet bar from them and the legal imperative to meet the agreement evidently meant that construction of the mills took priority over completion of the estate.24 Barbara Baldwin conveyed the shock of its makeshift, even wasteland appearance when the family arrived in 1921: My father had been told that the company was providing fine family homes with large backyards, not that they were built on sand and that there wasn’t any electricity to begin with. My mother said it would be better to be an Arab living in a tent in the Sahara than a brick house with such flimsy foundations. She had an uphill battle to get rid of that sand which never stopped blowing in from the street because there wasn’t any paving or gutters.25 Gladys and Ernest Heath recalled the astonishment of parents and family friends back in Wales when letters arrived from Australia describing conditions that were worse than those of Newport. ‘We thought it was old-fashioned here but they didn’t even have electric trams.’26 The Heaths were adamant that the men migrated to Australia not because they wanted the freestanding houses and big backyards trumpeted by the company rather than the terrace houses of the Newport estate (‘we had good backyards’), but simply because ‘they couldn’t get a living there’. Ernest emphasized the uncertainty of employment noting that apart from a skeleton crew workers had to be on the company roll and turn up at the Newport mills gate at the start of the three shifts, when their names might or might not be called. In spite or perhaps because of their parents’ homesickness, those interviewed had an abiding attachment to the estate and its surroundings. They were committed to their history being put on record with due care. The maps in Bill Claridge’s memoir, The Pommy Town Years, are remarkable for the equal weight they give to the small and the large. Thus the attention to detail is the same whether he is sketching the space around his parents’ house (where the family cats’ burial ground is recorded as being beneath the grape vines along with the wry aside ‘good for grapes’), or the major features of the area. The importance attached to correct detail is also evident in the testy response of a former estate resident to a comment in the Newcastle Herald that Pommy Towners swam at a particular swimming ‘hole’ in the 1920s.27 The exchange evoked the old rivalry between the ‘top end’ Mayfield residents up the hill, and those of Pommy Town and ‘Frog Hollow’ (the estate’s underprivileged neighbour) who in childhood formed a common bond against outsiders.28 Bill Claridge, for example, described the Pommy Town and Frog Hollow boys sitting on the sandy pavement around a fire made from dung collected from the golf course to keep the mosquitoes at bay, singing the Australian ballads ‘Cootamundra’, ‘Down Wagga Way’ and ‘Crowajing’ while he sat in the family house pedalling the pianola.29 Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Bertrand Gibbs in his Vine St house (formerly part of the Lysaght estate), 1999. Photo: Alan Chawner. Author’s collection. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Bertrand Gibbs in his Vine St house (formerly part of the Lysaght estate), 1999. Photo: Alan Chawner. Author’s collection. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Barbara Baldwin in her Vine Street shop-house in 1948. This estate house was altered by her brother in the 1940s to turn the front of it into a shop. She lived in the back. Courtesy of Barbara Baldwin. Author’s collection. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Barbara Baldwin in her Vine Street shop-house in 1948. This estate house was altered by her brother in the 1940s to turn the front of it into a shop. She lived in the back. Courtesy of Barbara Baldwin. Author’s collection. Newcastle-born and longterm Mayfield resident Helen Marshall recalled the hostility between the Mayfield children and the estate: Even though my sister and I were good friends with all the Pommy kids at school, my mother would sometimes go through Pommy Town to visit a friend of hers who lived along Bull Street, and the Pommy Town boys would throw stones at us and say ‘Get out of our village!’ and until my sister and I called out ‘Stop it, we’ll see you at school on Monday and we’re going to tell on you’, they would keep on. They could land stones in front and at the back of us and never hit us, but they didn’t like people walking through their village because at that time there was great ill feeling. They just resented any Australians walking down there.30 The ‘them and us’ stance of the estate children derived from the standoff between their parents and the wider Newcastle community, due in turn to the deterioration of Australian workers’ living and work standards in the early 1920s.31 The uncompromising protectionist position expressed at the Australian Labor Party’s New South Wales State Conference, held soon after the arrival of the Lysaght contingent from Bristol in March 1921, is in this context not surprising. At the conference it was agreed that the executive of the Australian Labor Party (N.S.W.) would cable the acting New South Wales premier ‘advising him to take steps to prevent further immigration until work could be found for all’.32 Prospects for Newcastle workers at this time were particularly bleak: ‘There was considerable unemployment in Newcastle and district during March’, reported the Newcastle Herald.33 The 1913 report on housing noted of Australian cities that ‘The unemployed clung desperately to the industrial centre as their one chance of getting work’.34 By 1921 Mayfield was the industrial hub not just of Newcastle but also of New South Wales and the high numbers of those out of work or intermittently employed contributed to an acute shortage of affordable housing. Not only were the newcomers seen to have snatched jobs from Australian-born citizens but there was considerable anger that they had been provided with company housing. Grievances related to the perception of the Lysaght men as a worker aristocracy were exacerbated by the Government’s decision to reduce the basic wage.35 Although shortly after their arrival the men became affiliated with the appropriate union – the Federated Ironworkers Association – the assumption prevailed that they were company lackeys.36 However in 1922 when widespread industry lockouts included the Lysaght workforce an editorial in the trade-union paper The Industrialist expressed sympathy, if in a condescending tone: These men, it would appear, were lured here on the understanding that they would have something like continuous employment. Rude, however, has been the awakening. Today they find themselves in a strange land, among people whose habits they do not understand and with the spectre of starvation haunting their very footsteps … today they stand in peril of being turned out of their houses because of inability to pay the toll demanded.37 The terms of the supply agreement between BHP and Lysaght meant that Lysaght was in step with the BHP lockouts. Ironically the men would have fared better in the United Kingdom where similar lockouts took place but where the unemployment benefit was more generous than in Australia.38 The Industrialist editorial also points to a problem beyond the causal link between the inhospitable reception of the migrants and the prevailing economic conditions. Such issues were underpinned by something more personal – the ways in which the newcomers differed from Australians. This was inseparable from the confusion about the ethnicity of the newcomers, one in which the identity of both English and Welsh groups was subsumed under the catchall term, ‘Poms’. Questions of assimilation arise because of the high proportion of workers of Welsh extraction in New South Wales. This had been the case there since the mid-nineteenth century, with many Welsh miners settling in Mayfield.39 Paradoxically, Novocastrians remembered the migrants as ‘foreigners’ who spoke a language not recognized as English. Robert (Bob) Power recalled ‘It was as if a space ship had landed – they were a race apart, we didn’t understand a word that they said’.40 For some time, he said, the estate was treated like a zoo, visited on the weekends so that the strange language could be listened to and reported on. Moreover, the unfamiliar appearance and habits of the newcomers were just as much a provocation as their incomprehensible accents and vernacular. As Michael Braddick reminds us, non-verbal language has a place in ‘marking out social relations within a given culture’ and it can become grounds for ‘contestation and misunderstanding’.41 In this instance, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the visible signs of the migrants’ dissimilarity to Australians contributed in no small part to the standoff. For example, according to Helen Marshall: The Australian women in the early days scorned the Pommy women. They had a habit of going down to the hotel with a milk jug to bring home a jug of beer for their husbands and this for some reason infuriated all the Australian women who saw them doing it. They often wore their husbands’ cloth caps too – Australian women would never do that. She added that the boys’ clothing made them targets in the schoolyard. ‘They were picked on because they were wearing jumpers so therefore they must be Pommies and the boys would beat them up.’42 AROUND THE ESTATE In 1920s Newcastle there was a sense of unhurried time. The rhythms of daily life had yet to be affected by modern technology such as radio’s segmented time-schedule and there were few cars on the streets. A sense of speeded-up time had yet to come. Charles (Charlie) Davidge and Bertie Gibbs, who like most of the migrant children worked at Lysaght in adulthood, spoke of the new importance of clock-time when the mechanization of the manual mills began in 1934 and the difficulty that the older men had adjusting to the new faster regime. Whereas previously they would put the iron in the furnaces and go off to the nearby pub (Amos’s) for a pint of black beer, the increased capacity of the mechanical mills was accompanied by pressure on the men to work at a much faster pace than before. At this point Lysaght also made its workers conform to company time through the practice of ‘clocking on and off’ – a practice which had been instituted at BHP more than a decade earlier.43 The children, especially the boys, were subjected to a certain amount of discipline – attending Sunday school at the estate chapel was said to be a precondition for inclusion in the junior football team, and most belonged to the Boys’ Brigade with its advocacy of discipline through drill and its aim to replace ‘the natural Gang Life of Boyhood with Team Life’.44 However attempts to regulate their lives evidently had limited effect. To ‘mooch’ as C. J. Dennis reminds us in his glossary of Australian slang is to ‘saunter about aimlessly’.45 Mooching around the old quarry (‘Dean’s Pottery’), the river, and the golf course was an essential part of the collective memories of the estate.46 Sometimes pocket money was earned through caddying for the golfers who played the Waratah (‘steelworks’) course. And more often than not mooching on the links meant that at the opportune moment a well-placed foot could camouflage a ball and its possessor thus find a few pennies for spending on sweets in the Richards’ Bull Street shop. Mooching around the Chinese market gardens could lead to the unexpected, such as spotting a gap in the hedge just the right size for a small body. A former Pommy Towner, Roy Howard, recounted trying to recreate the sensuous memory of dribbling the juicy guava berries he pinched from the gardens in childhood and his surprise and disappointment when the bush yielded yellow instead of the red berries of his youth, the only colour he had ever associated with the fruit.47 The persistence of traces of plant life sometimes figured in tales of the Chinese market garden. One person told of the rhubarb cutting she took in 1934 when the steady sprawl of heavy industry finally drove the three market gardeners out. That cutting provided her with breakfast for over sixty years. And at least three people noted that the watercress in the creek between the golf links and the market garden in the 1920s still flourished at the end of the century in the drain outside what was by then Tubemakers. Although the area had been completely transformed, there was thus a sense of continuity through plants that had persisted and flourished in places known only to the initiated. In the over-inscribed ‘scenic space of memory’, as Christine Boyer terms it, in the places summoned back by tales of Cox’s dairy farm, the golf course, quarry, river and the Chinese market gardens, two restless ghost figures appear: the swagman (swaggie) and the horse.48 Each represents the lag in modernity typical of 1920s Australia, when the urban was not yet dominant. The swagman answered to no one, but (unlike the European gypsy) was not seen as a threat to local communities. He also bore little resemblance to the degraded figure of the homeless person in the contemporary metropolis. Perhaps his mythic appeal relates to the chameleon-like ability to challenge the fixity of at-home-ness by moving with ease between urban and rural environments. The story of the ‘snow’ tiles on the roof of Stewarts and Lloyds, we have argued, nostalgically evoked a lost relationship between firm and worker. Similarly, memories of the swagmen who once camped around Pommy Town surfaced at a time when a general sense of social responsibility seemed to be disappearing, displaced by the fetish of the nuclear family and the phenomenon of ‘networking’, the assiduous cultivation of those relationships that further self-interest. Tales of swagmen almost always began with them being brought home for a feed, a beer and a bath, but they were not told with a sense of superiority. Frequently a connection with neighbourliness was made, perhaps in the way that anecdotes ended on apparent digressions, as in Bill Claridge’s caustic observation: ‘These days you’re lucky if your neighbour gives you a wave as he drives past in his car – in those days he’d drop in for a game of cards’.49 Swagmen, like Pommy Towners, had their places in the townscape, temporary yet constant. The details given of their habitat and habits indicate an active relationship between residents of the brick cottages of the workers’ estate and the homeless wanderers. Edith Claridge spoke of her father regularly bringing home the men who set up residence in the outhouses behind the ‘Folly’ (the nineteenth-century Waratah House which had become the clubhouse) on the golf course, and her mother imperturbably stirring their clothes in the copper with a big stick.50 Other communities of swagmen were remembered by Helen Marshall as camping along the riverbanks towards Pommy Town where they would sleep under sheets of iron put across lantana bushes or in an enormous hollow tree with a burnt-out inside – it was ‘almost like a little house in there’. And she described how the children watched the men roll their swags in the morning: ‘they’d so neatly pack their gear that the blanket they had it in became a really tight cylinder of blanket with all these objects wrapped inside and tied with leather straps, or even with a bit of rope’.51 In the collective memories of the estate the swaggie was a benign and intriguing figure. Acknowledged masters of the art of packing, the wanderers were also greatly appreciated by their young audience for the seemingly inexhaustible supply of jokes and riddles they had collected and refined on their travels. The figure of the ‘jolly swagman’ was thus very much part of estate lore.52 The horse, like the swagman, was present as much in the city as in the country during these years when rural and urban intermingled. Horse stories abounded in the accounts of life in the 1920s, Every Sunday morning after Chapel, the steel men (several of whom may have been in the English artillery during the Great War) raced their horses along the dangerously narrow strip between the hand-hewn wood slip-rail fence and the telephone poles of Bull Street, the winner collecting a bottle of beer.53 One story told how pranksters – whose names, it was stressed by the ninety-year-old teller (no doubt, one of the culprits) can never be disclosed – painted a horse’s ribs white, terrifying ‘poor old Sid’ as he arrived for the early morning shift at the mills. He burst in to report a ghost flying up and down the golf-course fence. In these endless horse stories there was a sense of people quoting themselves. An element of boredom might enter the retelling so that the narrator sometimes forgot to tell the punch-line which was, however, inevitably supplied by someone else at another point. One told over and over again and connected to a particular Pommy Towner was finally retold by his son, ‘Now if you’ve heard the story about my father and his horse’ and given a totally different spin so that his father appears as a noble figure rather than the quixotic tippler of local lore. The power of the storyteller was thus acknowledged, but also the difficulty of asserting the authority of the one over that of the many. PANORAMA AND TOUR After our initial disappointment at not finding the panorama at Tubemakers, the bush telegraph had produced more intriguing but ultimately false leads. With few options left, I dropped in one day to make enquiries at the Hunter Women’s Centre, the site of the former community hall. A week later, as I was about to leave home to interview one of the original estate residents who lived near the Centre, I received a telephone call. My visit had prompted a spring-clean of the storeroom during which the panorama had been discovered, buried beneath a huge pile of old party bunting. The interview that day was with Catherine (Kit) Brown who had come out with her parents from Wales as a small child.54 The video recording begins with a tight shot of the photograph laid out on her dining room table. Then Kit’s age-spotted, heavily-veined hand comes into frame and moves across the panorama pausing at times as she comments on the various landmarks. As she does so, her voice takes on an introspective ‘thinking aloud’ quality imparting an uncanny sense that momentarily she reinhabits another time and space. At first glance, the image seems almost featureless, the flatness of the terrain emphasized because the area has yet to be fully occupied. Kit was able to verify from its content that the joined photographs that comprise the panorama were taken no later than the 1920s and it seems probable that it was a product of surveying in the area prior to the selling of swathes of land as new sites for industry. As an image it offers a photographic example of what Michel de Certeau terms ‘mapping’ – different images have been combined ‘to form the tableau of a “state” of geographic knowledge’.55 But with it laid out before us on the dining-room table, all that was in the wings emerged as Kit’s narration and the knowledge I had gleaned from the interviews combined to transform the static panorama into the dynamic event, which de Certeau calls a ‘tour’.56 Many of Kit’s childhood memories were connected to the Chinese market gardens and despite the poor quality of the image, with the magnifying tool of memory she could show us their precise location and give meaning to other things there that for us meant nothing. Small circular shapes were identified as wells, inside which, she said, ran ladders which the market gardener (the ‘Chinaman’) clambered up and down when fetching water. She described how the estate children helped him water the long rows of vegetables, and recalled a new horse story, of the old man sitting fast asleep on his cart as his faithful horse made the daily dawn trip into town to deliver fruit and vegetables. At the market, the greengrocers would unload the dray and turn the old blinkered carthorse around. Thus set on its course homeward-bound, it would plod unerringly through the city and out through Pommy Town to its market-garden stable, giving its owner who had slept for the entire trip, a well-deserved rest. This, said our map-reader, is Grandma Norgard’s cottage on Bull Street where ‘Chips’ who repaired the Lysaght coal wagons lodged. He was called Chips (according to Bill Claridge) because he was a ‘bush carpenter’ and, although an Australian, his friendship with the steel men was such that he was regarded as an honorary Pommy Towner.57 And here was the place where the men raced their horses after chapel on Sunday: the slip-rail fence and the narrow strip of land between it and the Bull Street telegraph poles are clear to see. The quarry, the golf course, and the Chinese market garden are shown on one side of Bull Street and Pommy Town on the other, where half a dozen houses of the estate front the main street. Among the identical houses, the roof of a larger building stands out: the Lysaght community hall. There on Saturday night, the babies were put on the two billiard tables and the adults and older children danced around them as the Pommy Town band played the popular songs of the day. It was there too that redheaded Maisie, wearing the special dancing shoes which gave her the edge, tangoed across the room in the arms of yet another smitten partner. The chapel is just out of shot, but Bull Street is shown to lead to the Lysaght and BHP works. The latter in the background spans both sides of the street, its horizontal solidity only broken by the upward thrust of its smokestacks. On the links, the figures of three golfers are just visible. Impossible not take pleasure in the speculation that one might be the legendary Dr Hamilton who, as several Pommy Towners observed, much preferred a wood to a scalpel. It was he who famously warned Winifred (Win) Pitt when she was on the brink of childbirth, ‘Don’t you hurry things because I’m playing in the cup this afternoon’, and who instructed her husband to get to the corner and wave a towel if – god forbid – she did go into labour. As she pointed out the features of the golf course, Kit remarked that after its closure at the end of the 1920s it reverted to wasteland. The knowledge that it had then served for a while as a slagheap for BHP was to be invaluable to working people in 1949, the year of a major strike by Hunter Valley miners. During that time of long-lasting lockouts the coal that stoked not just industry but also household stoves was rationed, and unaffordable for those out of work or on low wages, so the paddock became the site of dawn-to-dusk invasion by hundreds of Novocastrians who, armed with picks and shovels, fossicked for the coal buried just below the grass.58 PLACE AS PALIMPSEST There was pleasure in witnessing Kit’s intense and joyful encounter with the panorama. It was a reminder that the loneliness of those who outlive their generation can be tempered by memory and countered by its power to thumb its nose at the irreversibility of time. And the finding of the lost panorama more than matched the expectations of the pursuit. There is something moving about the way it catches an early moment of Australian modernity, a point at which town and country – well and smoke-stack, unsealed road and telegraph poles – coexist in close proximity. Bertie Gibbs was right: seeing it gave me a satisfyingly precise knowledge of the relationship between Pommy Town and the major features of the environment, which had been so frequently discussed. But the cumulative effect of the constant evocation of the estate and its surroundings, whether through Kit Brown’s spontaneous reading of the panorama, the meticulous drawings of Bill Claridge or the equally marvellous images in the mind’s eye, was not so much to offer an obvious lesson in the difference between then and now, but rather to open out my understanding of the place as a palimpsest. Thus the way I found myself conceptualizing then reconceptualizing it was as shifting and overlaid as the memories that invoked it. And one outcome of the project was that whenever I drove past the former estate, I experienced an almost hallucinatory sense of a layered but visitable past, a connectedness with part of Newcastle that had hitherto seemed drab and unremarkable. Contemporary and historical images and sounds intermingled – I heard Win Pitt saying ‘When people talk about the unions these days they don’t realize they would have nothing if the unions weren’t there’, along with the voices of the Welsh steel men uplifted in song as they squelched their way through the deep sand to work.59 Also evoked were images of two small boys on errands in different towns on either side of the world. In the Lliswerry ward of East Newport, Wales, Ernie Heath would be hurrying to the Lysaght mills carrying his father’s meal in a pail with a rope handle. In East Mayfield, Newcastle, Australia, Bill Claridge, a boy of a similar age, would be on his way up Bull Street to the Lysaght mills carrying a stack of plates collected from different houses, each meal sandwiched between two plates and secured with a calico cloth, and carefully balancing his load (it represented valuable pocket money) as he went. In 2004 I left Newcastle. Over a decade later when I paid a return visit to Mayfield further significant changes had occurred. One concerned pollution. Shortly after the arrival of the Lysaght workers in March 1921, the Newcastle Sun had noted that ‘unkind people call Newcastle the Great Unwashed’, but exonerated the people from blame for the insalubrious nickname: ‘Day and night the Steel Works and subsidiary industries contribute to the great cloud which vitiates the atmosphere and chokes the nostrils’.60 Proximity to the mills and low-lying location meant that the estate (and its neighbour, Frog Hollow) bore the brunt of the constant emissions of soot over the years. Nonetheless in the early years, the brick cottages had been the envy of many Mayfield workers. Today, with deindustrialization – the departure of the BHP and its many spin-off industries – the pall has finally lifted. Gentrification is underway as the ‘top end’ streets in Upper Mayfield come into their own. Once, in the pre-industrial era before 1915, they were the preferred place of residence for the upper-middle class. Later many became boarding-houses for single working men, including those employed by Lysaght. Now, with another turn of the wheel, young professionals and high-income earners are moving in and renovating the Victorian and Federation houses. On the ex-estate a trickle-down effect is evident in the rising value of the cottages and in the patchy renewal that is taking place. But the former residents would have been mortified by the neglected look of some houses and the presence of rubbish-strewn front gardens in their ‘village’. The trees and shrubs that had served to hide and distinguish Bertrand Gibbs’s place (his attempt to create something of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’) have gone, so too the pretty brick and wrought-iron entrance gate he designed and constructed. But although the house is revealed as just a small typical Australian bungalow perhaps he would have been pleased that its similarity to those around it is not immediately evident. It was poignant to see Barbara Baldwin’s corner shop/house completely boarded up. (Fig. 4) When her brother came back from the war, he did not want to return to work at the mills and he persuaded her to turn their cottage, which their parents had bought from the company in the late 1920s, into a corner shop. In 2016 only the faded hoardings indicated that it had once been a lively hub of the estate. The now heritage-listed Simpson cottage, which was the sole occupant of the land when Lysaght bought it and temporary home to the large Claridge family before it became the estate chapel, was empty. Across the road the BHP subsidiary One Steel, which had replaced Tubemakers, which had in turn replaced Stewarts and Lloyds, was about to close. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Boarded up shop in Vine St. Formerly the Lysaght estate house of Harry Mitchell. Converted into a shop/residence by his daughter Barbara Baldwin in the late 1940s. Photo: Salvatore Panatteri, 2016. Author's collection. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Boarded up shop in Vine St. Formerly the Lysaght estate house of Harry Mitchell. Converted into a shop/residence by his daughter Barbara Baldwin in the late 1940s. Photo: Salvatore Panatteri, 2016. Author's collection. The nearby drain with the watercress that had flourished for so long, which had been a reminder of the Chinese market garden and the Waratah golf course, had disappeared – ripped out just before my visit by telephone contractors digging pits to replace copper cable with fibre optic cable. In his memoir Bill Claridge recalls his thoughts as a child when the SS Demosthenes was rounding ‘The Great Australian Bight’ on its way to Sydney: Up until now I had accepted the new life without thought or question but every now and again I would think of my mates. There would be no more trips to Water Lane, Clifton Downs, The Shaftesbury and so forth and I would feel sad. How often at dusk, even night, I would take a message to Grandma ‘outside the gate’. I was never frightened even at night though Bristol was a big city and the walk from our home in Edward Street to Grandma’s was very dark and lonely.61 In photographs of the formal lunches given to the migrants when they arrived in Sydney en route to Newcastle the faces turned towards the camera are mostly serious. Perhaps a dignified company image was thought to be required, yet it is easy to imagine that the adults were feeling a sense of loss even greater than that described by the eleven-year-old Bill Claridge, along with trepidation as to whether their new lives on the other side of the world would offer any improvement on their old ones. Any such apprehension would have been well founded. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide House in Avon St in a run-down state. Former residence of Jack and Winifred Pitt and the first house built on the Lysaght estate, 2015. Photo: Salvatore Panatteri, 2016. Author's collection. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide House in Avon St in a run-down state. Former residence of Jack and Winifred Pitt and the first house built on the Lysaght estate, 2015. Photo: Salvatore Panatteri, 2016. Author's collection. The standoff between the estate and local residents did gradually break down, the improvement attributed to the community’s impressive record in the various codes of football.62 However, from all accounts, a residual current of distrust between the communities persisted for many years. The decisive moment for genuine conciliation was said by everyone to have been the outbreak of the Second World War which prompted a strong sense of solidarity based upon patriotism and the belated acknowledgement of the (mostly) shared ‘Britishness’.63 Lysaght’s expansion of its workforce to include hundreds more locals was a significant contributing factor. ‘That’s when we got to know each other and things came right’, recalled Jack Parsons who was part of the intake.64 A new ease between local and migrant women also emerged as for the first time women became part of the Lysaght work force.65 And unity was a response to imminent threat from the enemy, a threat realized on 8 June 1942 with the offshore shelling of Newcastle by a Japanese submarine. The target was the cluster of Mayfield steelworks and three unexploded shells landed on the Lysaght side of the fence the company shared with BHP, 700 yards from the estate.66 Migrants suffered additional anxiety about the welfare of their relations, particularly those in Bristol where the devastating bombing of the industrial and therefore (as in Mayfield) working-class area, began as early as 1940. Many thus remembered V-Day on 8 May 1945 as the happiest day of their lives. Trestle tables were set up in Avon street, pianos rolled out, Union Jacks hoisted and a big street party held to which, it was said, all local residents were invited and to which many came. If in the 1920s the term ‘Pommy Town’ had pejorative overtones, from the 1940s on its negative connotations were fading. By the end of the century it was used (mainly) with affection not just by Novocastrians but also by the former estate residents themselves. There was pride that Lysaght had played a significant role in the manufacture of war munitions and especially in the production of the Owen submarine gun, a highly secretive operation.67 The eighty and ninety-year-olds interviewed also expressed satisfaction that within their lifetime corrugated iron had become an Australian icon. A letter in the Sydney Morning Herald at the end of the twentieth century noted, ‘It’s hard to imagine what Australia would have looked like without Lysaght’s corrugated steel roofing’, and drew attention to the history of corrugated steel in ‘rural homesteads, shearing sheds, outhouses and water tanks’, as well as to its contemporary usage in cheap and expensive houses and at the Sydney Olympic site.68 More ambiguous was the way that the company was remembered. Sharp criticism of early management practice, especially the disregard of worker safety, would frequently conclude with a seeming non sequitur along the lines of ‘But it was a wonderful firm!’ The qualification indicated the complex interplay between paternalism, loyalty and the interviewees’ awareness that the golden age of Australian industry, and thus the time of workers being able to buy their own houses, was over. Invariably Lysaght was favourably contrasted with BHP, with the claim that Lysaght workers were always known by name, whereas even in BHP’s more modest early days, the men were never more than ‘numbers’. The story told to us about the tiles on the roof of Stewarts and Lloyds functions as a hieroglyph decipherable within the context of industrial modernity, the era of ocean travel, but opaque in an age when the northern and southern seasons can be experienced within the same week. With the imminent closing of One Steel the old building will probably soon be demolished and once the physical traces of the tiles are gone the psychic traces will last only within living memory. Hence there is an uncanny quality to the fable of home and homesickness, that sense of strangeness which imbues all memories where meaning is unlikely to be valued by history, but which nonetheless surfaces, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, at a moment of need. In this instance, such a moment occurred with the crisis caused by the city losing its staple industry, a betrayal far removed from the sympathetic intentions suggested by the story of the roof. Benjamin observes that often all that remains of the past is a name.69 In Newport, Wales, the steel workers who came to Lysaght’s from Staffordshire are remembered in the city’s street names – Bilston, Dudley, Walsall, and Wednesbury. In Mayfield, Australia, it can be said that the dairy farm and meat-works, which existed in the area prior to its intense industrialization, have a certain afterlife in the name ‘Bull Street’, an animal not human reference. Thus, too, Benjamin’s surrealist-inspired proposition that ‘the magic of the corner’ results from the encounter of two different street names has resonance in the context of the junction of two estate streets, Bull Street and Industrial Drive.70 A large part of Bull Street along with two estate houses was demolished in the early 1970s when Industrial Drive, a four-lane motorway, replaced most of the old Bull Street throughway that had been built for horse and cart and could not handle the huge increase in heavy vehicles and flow of traffic which accompanied the concentration of industry in Mayfield. At the same time, Vine Street was widened to become a major arterial road. With these changes the former estate lost its village-like compactness, its safe walking and relative quiet. While previously ‘Bull Street’ had signified the pre-modern and ‘Industrial Drive’ modernity, with the closure of the steelworks in 1999 and the disappearance by 2015 of most of the functioning smokestacks from the cityscape, ‘Industrial Drive’ and Newcastle’s nickname ‘Steel City’ have also now become part of the town’s memory archive. Referring to Benjamin’s conception of the street name as an object of mimesis, Christine Boyer notes that in the act of preserving and refiguring what Benjamin terms ‘the habitus of a lived life’, cities can take on the features of a face.71 In Mayfield, the names of the streets that comprised the former grid of the estate – Avon, Usk, Vine and Wye streets – are derived from Bristol and Newport and are telling examples of such a mimesis, as are many streets in colonized countries. In their invocation of the European ‘face’ there is a sense of a return in a roundabout way to the earlier anecdote of a firm making a pattern of titles on the roof of its building in order therapeutically to invoke the climatic conditions of living in Scotland. But as de Certeau reminds us, ‘There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not’. The panorama that I sought and found lacked overt indications of the existence of an earlier presence. It is salutary then to remember that immanent in the story of Pommy Town is the story of another displacement, one that exists in another collective memory – the story of the Awabakai people, the original indigenous inhabitants of the area.72 Helen Macallan is a Research Associate in the School of Communications, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 Author’s video interview with William Claridge, Mayfield, 8 Feb. 1999. 2 Seventy-five sheet ironworkers and their families arrived from Newport on 9 March 1921, and twenty-six galvanizers and their families from Bristol on 26 March 1921. See Peter N. Richards, Lysaght Enterprise: the Company, Processes, Products and People, Port Kembla, 1992, p. 11. 3 Eric Eklund, Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life, Sydney, 2012, p. 15. For different perspectives on decisions by British companies to set up manufacturing plants overseas see: Neil Hood and Stephen Young, The Economics of Multinational Enterprise, London & New York, 1979, pp. 44–84; Peter J. Buckley and Mark Casson, The Economic Theory of the Multinational Enterprise, London, 1985, pp. 60–98, and Edgar Jones, A History of GKN, vol. 2 The Growth of a Business, 1918–45, intro. David Lees, 1990, p. 322. 4 There were other examples of housing for industrial workers in Australia but they did not have the planned element of the Lysaght estate, nor were they specifically intended for migrants. For an account of the ‘Sunshine Estate’, the land bought and sold by the industrialist H. V. McKay to his employees, see Olwyn Ford, Harvester Town, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 99–106. 5 ‘Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Question of the Housing of Workmen in Europe and America’, Sydney, 1913, pp. 4–5. 6 John McMeekin, Superintendent of Construction, BHP Company’s Steel Works, Mayfield, in ‘Report and Minutes of Evidence NSWPP on Public Works Report relating to the proposed Erection of Dwellings for Workmen on Crown Lands at North Stockton near Newcastle, under the provisions of the Housing Act’, 26 Nov. 1915, p. 834. 7 Richards, Lysaght Enterprise, p. 11. 8 F. J. Riley writing in his capacity as Secretary of the Victorian Branch of the Manufacturing Grocers Employees, Federation of Australia. ‘The Attitude of Labour towards the Industrial Welfare Movement’, in Health, vol. 111: 3 May 1925, Commonwealth Department of Health, unpaginated. 9 By 1913 Australia was importing seventy percent of the parent company’s output. In 1918 John Lysaght (Aus) Pty, Ltd was incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of John Lysaght Lt UK and the Australian Head office was transferred from Melbourne to Sydney. See Steve J. Berry, 1898–1998 Orb Works 100 Years, Newport, 1998, p. 4. 10 Jones, History of GKN, pp. 332–5. 11 Lysaght Century 1857–1957, Bristol and London, 1957, pp. 15–20. 12 Paul Ashton, ‘Reactions to and Paradoxes of Modernism: the the Origins and Spread of Suburbia in 1920s Sydney’, unpublished PhD, Macquarie University, Sydney, 1999, p. 4. 13 David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: an Argument for Continuity’, The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts, London and New York, 2001, p. 154. 14 Mayfield had three Chinese market gardens in in the 1920s. See William Claridge, The Pommy Town Years: Memories of the Early Years in Mayfield and Other Stories, ed. Helen Macallan, intro. John Ramsland, Newcastle, 2000, p. 44. It is tempting to ascribe the extraordinary number of Chinese market gardens in Australia at this time solely to the work restrictions of the ‘White Australia’ policy (1901–73), but Ann Curthoys notes the need to situate such issues within the framework of the long and intertwined history of immigration and colonization. See ‘Chineseness and Australian Identity’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, ed. Henry Chan, Ann Curthoys and Nora Chiang, Taipei and Canberra, 2001, pp. 17–18. 15 BHP closed its Newcastle steelworks on 30 Sept. 1999. Its merger with the London-based company Billiton was announced by the Australian Prime Minister on national radio, 19 March 2001. 16 The story’s mythical rather than factual basis is evident. The story of the patterned tiles being designed to comfort workers was well-known yet no one drew attention to this fundamental inconsistency. 17 See Richards, Lysaght Enterprise, pp. 329–34 18 See for example, ‘Pommy Town survivors have lunch with boss’, Newcastle Herald, 7 Feb. 1989, p. 6. 19 Author’s video interview with Gladys and Ernest Heath, Newport, Wales, 3 Aug. 2000. 20 Author’s video interview with Bertrand Gibbs, Mayfield, 9 Feb. 1999. 21 Arnott's was a well-known biscuit factory founded in Newcastle (Australia) in 1865 and taken over by Campbells Soup of North America in 2001. 22 ‘Off to Australia’, Lysaght Bulletin, Bristol, 4 Feb. 1921, p. 1. (Typescript in BHP Library, Melbourne: BHPA W40/5/527.) 23 ‘Galvanised Iron in the Making’, Newcastle Sun, 17 May 1921, p. 2; ‘New Australian Industry’, Sydney Mail, 18 May 1921, p. 16. Six years after the migrants’ arrival only five cottages were yet connected. See Hunter District Water Supply and Sewerage records AB 3308, 1927, p. 159. 24 See Richards, Lysaght Enterprise, p. 15. The history of utopian promises to migrants and their inevitable undermining when news came back that all was not as anticipated is discussed by Frank Bongiorno in ‘British to their Bootheels too: Britishness and Australian Radicalism’, London, 2006, pp. 21–2. 25 Author’s video interview with Barbara Baldwin, Mayfield, 17 Jan. 1999. 26 Author’s video interview with Gladys and Ernest Heath. Newport had electric trams by 1903 (the terminus was at the Lysaght mills): Haydn Davis, The History of the Borough of Newport: from Swamp to Super-town, Newport, 1998, pp. 201–2. Two decades later, electric trams ran in Newcastle, Australia. See Newcastle Sun, ‘Newcastle Electrified At Last’, 17 Dec. 1923, front page. 27 Gary Bentley, Newcastle Herald, 24 Dec. 1997, p. 9. and Frank Walker, Newcastle Herald, 27 Jan. 1998, p. 8. 28 ‘Frog Hollow’ was the colloquial term for the area (Arthur and William streets), which adjoined the estate. 29 Author’s interview with William Claridge. 30 Bob James tape interview with Helen Marshall, Mayfield, 7 Dec. 1998. 31 See Carl Boris, Australia and the Great Depression: a Study of Economic Development and Policy in the 1920s and 1930s, Sydney, 1970, pp. 58–9, for the contraction of the Australian economy in the early 1920s. 32 See report in Newcastle Sun, 21 March 1921, p. 7. 33 ‘Industrial Matters’, Newcastle Herald, 1 April 1921, p. 4. See J. C. Docherty, Newcastle: the Making of an Australian City, Sydney, 1983, p. 172, for unemployment statistics in Newcastle in the 1920s. 34 Report of the Commission of Inquiry, Sydney, 1913. 35 ‘The Basic Wage’, The Industrialist, 18 May 1922, front page. 36 ‘One Big Union for the Iron Trades’, The Industrialist, 2 June 1921, p. 3. 37 The Industrialist, 30 March 1922, p. 2. See also Ray Broomhill, Unemployed Workers: a Social History of the Great Depression in Adelaide, Queensland, 1978, p. 83. 38 See Broomhill, Unemployed Workers, p. 83. 39 For the unusually high proportion of British born (English and Welsh) residents in Newcastle in the nineteenth century compared with the rest of New South Wales, see Docherty, Newcastle, p. 15. In addition, Mayfield East and the adjacent suburb, Tighes Hill, were nick-named ‘Little Wales’: Deirdre Moore, Little Wales: Stories of Ingall Street, Mayfield Eisteddfods and Leek Soup, unpaginated pamphlet, Bob James, Tighes Hill, 1997. 40 Author’s video interview with Robert Power, New Lambton, 11 Feb. 1999. 41 Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction: the Politics of Gesture’, in Past and Present 203: suppl. 4, 1 Jan. 2009, pp. 9–35: https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtp001, last accessed 8 Oct. 2017. 42 James interview with Marshall, 7 Dec. 1998. 43 See Christopher Wright, ‘The Formative Years of Management Control at the Newcastle Steelworks, 1913–1924’, Labour History 55, Nov. 1988, p. 68. 44 Boys Brigade, The Plan, undated, Mitchell Library, Sydney, p. 16. In the 1920s and 1930s most of the estate children belonged to the East Mayfield Boys Brigade. In the 1940s allegiance shifted to the newly created Lysaght division of the St Johns Ambulance and Boys Police Club. (Author’s video interview with Charles Davidge, 10 Feb. 1999.) 45 C. J. Dennis, Rose of Spadgers, Sydney, 1924, p. 186. 46 Men in the interviews often responded to a general question about their childhood play with anecdotes about roaming the open spaces around the estate. Women replied to the same question with stories about staging plays, playing card and skipping games and occasionally going to the ‘pictures’. Nonetheless their familiarity with the surrounds of the estate suggested that they too spent time mooching. The gender ideology of the era in which they were children probably affected their emphases in later life. 47 Author’s video interview with Roy Howard, Cardiff (Lake Macquarie), 20 Jan. 1999. 48 Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments, Cambridge MA, 1994, p. 68. 49 Author’s video interview with William Claridge, 8 Feb. 1999. 50 Author’s video interview with Edith Claridge, Eleebana (Lake Macquarie), 8 Feb. 1999. 51 James interview with Marshall, 7 Dec. 1998. 52 For explanations of the ‘jolliness’ of the swagman see Don Watson, The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia, Australia, 2014, p. 125. 53 It is more likely that the men were in the infantry. See ‘History of John Lysaght Ltd’, by the Barton Hill History Group which notes ‘John Lysaght’s provided many new recruits to the Somerset Light Infantry’: http://www.bhhg.co.uk (accessed 19 Dec. 2015). 54 Author’s video interview with Catherine Brown, Mayfield, 23 Feb. 1999. 55 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven F. Rendell, Berkeley, 2011, p. 121. 56 de Certeau, Everyday Life, p. 119. 57 A bush carpenter is ‘a rough amateur carpenter’: see Macquarie Dictionary, Sydney, 2013, p. 204. 58 See ‘Drastic Coal Rationing’, Newcastle Herald, 17 June 1949, front page. 59 Author’s interview with Winifred Pitt, Mayfield, Aug. 1999. 60 ‘Keep Your City Clean – Purer Air for Newcastle’, Newcastle Sun, 8 March 1921, p. 3. 61 The Pommy Town Years, p. 28. 62 Author’s video interview with Bob Power, New Lambton, 11 Jan. 1999. ‘Mayfield United Soccer Football Club 70th Year Reunion Souvenir Programme’ (unpaginated) acknowledges the roots of the contemporary Mayfield soccer team in the Lysaght football club. 63 See Helen Marshall audiotape interview by Bob James, Mayfield, 17 Dec. 1998. 64 Author’s interview with Jack Parsons, Mayfield, 5 April 2000. 65 Women were valued for their particular proficiency in the ‘machining’ of aircraft components to ‘exacting standards of accuracy’: Lysaght Century, p. 40. 66 The Japanese attack resulted only in two minor casualties and limited damage to property: Terry Jones and Steven Carruthers, A Parting Shot: Shelling of Newcastle by Japanese Submarines 1942, Narrabeen, 2013, pp. 124 and 136. 67 A total of 45,000 guns and over half a million magazines were produced during the war years. See Lysaght Century, p. 40. 68 John P. Brannan, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 May 1998, p. 20. 69 Quoted in Richard Sieburth, ‘Benjamin the Scrivener’, Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith, Chicago and London, 1989, p. 14. 70 Sieburth, ‘Benjamin the Scrivener’, p. 15. 71 Christine M. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments, Cambridge MA, 1994, p. 335. 72 For an account of the dispossession that occurred in the area in the teens and 1920s see Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, St Leonards, 1996, pp. 149–70, and Frank Bongiorno and Erik Eklund, ‘The Problem of Belonging: Contested Country in Australian Local History’, New Scholar: an International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences 3: 1, 2014, pp. 39–53. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Paul, K Tawny

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbx062pmid: N/A

Abstract This article addresses the social, cultural and gendered meanings of men’s work in early modern Britain. As has long been accepted for women, men’s work should be seen as multiple rather than single-occupational focused. Drawing on the diaries of three middle-rank tradesmen from the eighteenth century, the article considers the different forms that work took, and how words denoting labour such as ‘employment’, ‘work’ and ‘business’ were actually understood. Men had a broad definition of work that challenges distinctions between labour and leisure. These various forms of work had diverse benefits, challenging narrower economic understandings of ‘value’. Work was about more than making a living: it was a source of fulfilment, status and social identity. Work’s value and contribution to identity and status changed over the course of the lifecycle. It was carried out and understood in relation to others, especially men’s wives, rather than merely supporting notions of power and independence. By applying the insights drawn from studies of female work to men’s productive activities, the article reformulates historians’ understandings of the place of work in early modern men’s lives. Like most people in the eighteenth century, Edmund Harrold made his living by working multiple jobs. A barber by training and title, he rented a small shop in Manchester where he shaved customers’ heads, bought and sold hair, and crafted wigs. In the hours unfilled by shaving, cutting and weaving, he also performed ‘cupping’, a medical service offered to lactating women. In addition to these principal employments, Harrold undertook other temporary income-generating activities or by-employments. He worked as a book dealer, and eventually as an auctioneer, selling various items in alehouses within Manchester and in outlying towns. In 1713, when times got hard, Harrold took on paid employment offered by civic authorities and worked as a dog muzzler. He lent out money, when he had it, earning ten percent interest on his holdings. Harrold’s household also depended upon the productive activities undertaken by his wife and dependents. His wife Sarah managed the rental of a room in their house to lodgers, retailed second-hand clothing, and operated a business washing clothes. In addition to these income-generating activities, Sarah contributed to the household’s maintenance by producing foodstuffs including bread.1 Edmund Harrold’s experience of multiple employments, described in a diary that he kept between 1712 and 1715, was typical of the occupational fluidity that characterized eighteenth-century working lives. Whether measured by the tools and goods in probate inventories, the work or maintenance activities described by the litigants and witnesses in court records, or the debts that individuals contracted, we know that occupational titles did not fully describe men’s productive activities and that occupational plurality was the norm. Individuals tended to combine different forms of work, and to move during their lives from one form of employment to another.2 For Harrold and others, this occupational plurality was a feature of maintaining what he described as a ‘computency of living’ in a precarious economic environment.3 Studies of by-employment tend to focus on the prevalence of supplementary work in financial terms. The frequency with which individuals took on subsidiary work, the methodologies that we use to measure by-employment, and the amount of income generated by a person’s different productive activities are all contested issues.4 Yet when considering men’s work, we have largely failed to account for by-employment in terms of identity. This is a significant oversight, because work was about much more than getting by. As Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz and Göran Rydén recently commented, lists of what people did do not tell us what work meant to them.5 Among other things, work provided a central component of masculine selfhood. According to Keith Thomas, for those who laboured to get their living, work was ‘not a means to an end, but an end in itself; not a job, but a vocation’.6 Clearly, Harrold’s sense of self and his feeling of being satisfied with his work was about more than being supported by his earnings or as he put it, his ‘bargains’. The precarious world of early modern labour contributed to the struggle for a secure work-based identity. Sociologists have found that those engaged in gig economies today may piece together a decent living, but they experience ‘failed occupationality’. In other words, they are unable to assume stable occupational identities. This can have consequences for an individual’s sense of fulfilment and selfhood.7 As Harrold reflected in his diary, ‘I think well of my bargain in general, but for the wanderings and settleness [settledness] of human nature that’s never satisfied, I find it hardest to please self’.8 Though the concept of ‘failed occupationality’ might seem an anachronism in a period when few people could expect stable occupational identities, we continue problematically to associate men with single occupations. In the literature of the time, character attributes, bodily characteristics and physical deformities were linked with particular trades, suggesting that occupational identity was a permanent condition. Men identified their worth or status by single occupations in legal and administrative records. In these settings, claiming an occupation was an important feature of solidarity and social distinction, used by middling people to distinguish themselves from those who lived by merely their labour.9 What happened to this sense of occupational identity, however, when men did multiple jobs – when, as in Harrold’s case, a wigmaker was in practice not a wigmaker, but a wigmaker, bookseller, medical practitioner and landlord? Much of the research on the nuances of work and working identities has focused on female labour. Accounting for women’s productive activities, which often sat outside of the formal occupational record, has required the development of new methodologies demanding that the historian look beyond the world of occupational titles. Yet while we have been attentive to the specificities and nuances of women’s work, we make assumptions about the nature of men’s work. In 1984, perhaps reading an insight of the women’s movement back onto the historical past, Mary Prior wrote that ‘What men did was definite, well defined, limited … What the women did was everything else’.10 Occupational titles, Prior believed, clearly delineated men’s productive activities. Over thirty years later, we are little closer to understanding the forms and meanings of male labour. As the pioneering ‘Gender and Work’ project in Sweden has made clear, we know remarkably little about both male and female work.11 Even if single occupations were understood at the time to be fictions, or at least transitory or temporary, these remnants of the archive continue to influence how historians think about men’s work. An investigation of what different working activities meant to men offers an opportunity to apply some of the insights developed around women’s work to the male experience, and to challenge our conceptualization of men’s working identities in two key ways. First, we need to reconsider the relationship between different kinds of productive activities. Though by-employments are normally considered to provide supplementary income while a person’s primary occupation provided their principal means of maintenance, we might position the status of different working activities differently if we consider them in terms of worth, skill, and reputation rather than just income. What kinds of benefits did different working activities confer? When men did multiple jobs, which occupation did they choose as their source of public identity, and why? This will allow us to account for male productive activity that was not paid. Second, we need to think about the meanings and identity implications of different forms of multiple-employment. By-employment can include forms of work undertaken by men at one point in time, the multiple and changing activities that individuals undertook across their lives, and the multiple productive activities undertaken by dependents within a household.12 Recognizing different forms of occupational plurality is useful to reconstructing male occupational identities because it allows us to consider work as a collective endeavour performed in relation to other people, and because it encourages us to attend to issues of life-cycle. An understanding of working identities that takes occupational plurality into account seems especially important in the eighteenth century, a period when, as Alex Shepard argues, people came to account for their worth more in terms of what they did than in terms of the material wealth that they had, and when, as John Rule suggests, skill and knowledge came to be considered forms of property.13 To consider the relationship between identity, masculinity and occupational plurality, it is necessary to look beyond formal administrative and legal records, where men were identified by either their occupational title, or their lack of one. In this article, I draw upon the diaries of three lower middling tradesmen: Thomas Parsons (1744–1813; diary 1769), a stone carver working in Bath, who was also an amateur scientist; John Cannon (1684–c.1743; diary 1735–43), agricultural labourer, exciseman, failed maltster, and teacher in the West Country, and the Manchester barber and wigmaker Edmund Harrold (1678–1721; diary 1712–15).14 The diaries provide glimpses of men at different points in the life-cycle, and with different experiences of occupational fluidity. Parsons was twenty-five years old when he penned the diary. Cannon’s memoir reflected over several decades of working life, while Harrold was in mid-life, married with children, and the head of his household. All three men experienced financial precariousness. Cannon described himself as the ‘tennis-ball of fortune’, and Parsons and Harrold struggled constantly with debt. Though the three diarists were clustered in the middle ranks of society, their experiences of occupational plurality, working identities, and the gendering of work within the household have implications for how we understand the working lives of a broader group of men. Most men in eighteenth-century Britain, except the very elite, worked for a living. Most held multiple employments, even if these contributed to different ends. For the better-off, by-employment was about maintaining competency and independence, while for the poor this was conceptualized as ‘making shift’ (avoiding poverty). Most men depended upon the contributions of their wives. The ideal of domesticity and a non-working wife did not emerge until the very end of the century.15 The three tradesmen did not pen their diaries with the explicit intention of keeping account of their work. However, in these texts, all three wrote extensively about their working lives, positioning labour within social, economic and religious practices. Parsons, a devout Baptist, and Harrold, a devout Anglican, both wrote with a religious impetus. By contrast, Cannon’s writing practices were more secular. He wrote as a form of participation in the eighteenth-century world of letters. However, though written with different motivations, the diaries intersect within the project of self-fashioning, which brought together religious and secular interests.16 When confronted with the uncertainties associated with working life, diaries provided all three men with spaces to ‘account’ for themselves within their communities.17 Writing was a form of self-examination that involved recounting one’s actions as a means of securing creditworthiness with the community. In the pre-modern economy, credit was crucial to getting by. It had a dual meaning both as a financial instrument and as a form of reputation and trustworthiness. Securing the credit of one’s household and one’s self was a task important enough that we might even consider diary-keeping a form of work itself.18 In their diaries, all three men reflected upon their employment in complex and multi-faceted ways: in terms of the income and the competency of living which their work afforded, in terms of the sense of self and status that they derived from these activities, and in terms of the spiritual concerns that shaped their management of wealth. Diaries combined narrative entries and social accounts with descriptions of items purchased and sold, goods lent and borrowed, work and services contracted and performed, and sermons heard and read. They accounted for their work, not just in terms of the pounds, shillings and pence that they earned, but in terms of the status, knowledge and relationships with others that work afforded. Defining Work Evidence drawn from diaries contributes to the project of defining work, an issue of much recent historiographical interest. The simple definition of work as ‘income-generating activity’ is now largely considered inadequate because it is limited to monetized labour, and excludes both the numerous forms of unpaid work that took place within early-modern households, as well as non-monetized forms of trade. Alternatively, broader verb-oriented and time-use approaches have defined work as the ‘use of time with the goal of making a living’.19 This methodology emphasizes what people did rather than what they were, and it has the capacity to include both monetized and non-monetized labour. The ‘third party criterion’, related to the verb-orientated approach, posits that anything that could be replaced with paid services or purchased should be considered work.20 However, these expansive definitions of work, which provide more inclusive understandings of production, have been more readily applied to women than to men in the early modern context. The diaries of the three tradesmen enhance historical definitions of work by providing insights into how individuals classified their own activities. These contemporary categorizations suggest that, in accounting for men’s labour, like women’s, we must move beyond definitions of work that emphasize only monetary remuneration. Just as definitions of capital distinguish between economic, social and cultural forms, so work had economic, social and cultural benefits.21 While historians normally use ‘work’ as a label for the variety of things that individuals did to make a living, contemporaries had a diverse lexicon that sorted work into different categories according to function and fulfilment, and in which different tasks were afforded different forms of status. The three diarists described their work using primarily three different words: ‘business’, ‘work’ and ‘living’. Thomas Parsons used the word ‘business’ when describing the management of his stone-cutting work. He described his daily activities as ‘Business which comprehends writing drawing, giving directions to others – working myself – and a great variety of articles that must constantly be remember’d to prevent confusion’.22 Similarly, Edmund Harrold used the word ‘business’ when referring to his capacity to earn an income and to remain solvent. He frequently thanked God for ‘good business’. In 1713, he recounted purchasing hair on credit ‘upon necessity to put on business if I can’.23 ‘Business’, therefore, was the process by which individuals converted their labour and their credit into a living. For both Parsons and Harrold, business had strong connotations of management. Their uses of the word reflected contemporary definitions of business as a pursuit demanding time and attention, distinctive from a pastime. ‘Business’ bore a strong relationship with the notion of oeconomy. Broadly understood to mean the management of resources according to an ordered system, oeconomy, as Karen Harvey suggests, came to define male governance over the household, where it constituted one of the important routes to patriarchal status and honour.24 While oeconomy anchored men to the home, it was also a crucial feature of work. Successful business was therefore not just about deriving an income, but about the appropriate management of resources, people, relationships, credits and debts. Harrold, for example, described the business of managing a bargain, recounting ‘I swapt Spark for 19 pampheletts and books with John Brook. And so Im for turning about the business if I can’.25 The management activity associated with business was often a source of anxiety. Parsons noted at one point that ‘Business increases my perplexity and confusion’.26 The undertaking of ‘business’ was at least partly conceptualized in religious terms, which may temper Margaret Hunt’s assertions that middling business people understood their wealth and their work in increasingly secular terms rather than in terms of divine providence.27 For the diarists, appropriate management was not signalled by maximizing profits, but rather by arranging resources according to a code of Christian ethics. Harrold and Parsons considered the possession of resources and the availability of work to be a feature of divine providence, and management of those resources a matter of religious duty. Harrold frequently thanked god for the provision of work. In 1712 he wrote ‘I had a good business to day, blessed be God for’t’. When work and resources were bestowed, wealth was not a reward, but rather an obligation. Parsons reflected that when entrusted with goods from God, ‘we must soon give an account of our management’.28 As part of their religious and ethical conceptualizations of work, diarists used a group of terms including ‘calling’, ‘vocation’ and ‘station’ to discuss their labour. These words referred to work less as a task undertaken, and more as a form of obligation to be fulfilled.29 As Parsons wrote, ‘Providence seems to increase my business and I must certainly pursue it – it is my duty’.30 Appropriately carrying out one’s work as a ‘duty’ could bring material reward, while similarly, vice or failure to fulfil duty could result in wealth lost. As Harrold wrote, ‘nothing more common than vice, yet nothing so much debases a mans courage, whereas virtue brings with it both pleasure and profit and easiness of mind and conscience’.31 Even the more secularly-minded John Cannon understood work and wealth within a code of Christian ethics. Reflecting on the working practices of a broker, who spent money as if it were his own, Cannon wrote that ‘a secret curse goes with goods ill-gotten … But goods and wealth honestly gotten will endure to all posterity according to the words of Solomon’.32 While the diarists wrote of ‘business’ or ‘duty’ to refer to the broader management of labour, they had other vocabularies to describe more specific responsibilities. ‘Work’ was a word used broadly to describe the specific tasks performed either by the diarists themselves or by others, and seemed to lack connotations of management. At times, it had undertones of manual labour. In Harrold’s text, work was often associated with physical effort. He often wrote of ‘working hard’ or ‘working close’. In 1712, he recounted ‘I worked close at reversion wig’ (a style of reverse-curled wig)’, and later ‘worked close till 8’. On other occasions, he described how he ‘got up at six and worked hard’ and ‘sweat hard’. Here, work was used to describe tasks associated with some sort of material gain or remuneration. Parsons used another related word, ‘living’, to describe activity undertaken for material gain, probably a derivative of the common contemporary phrase ‘living by one’s labour’. Harrold prayed to God to ‘get into a method of living well and comfortably’, and thanked heaven for being out of debt.33 While the three diarists used a clutch of terms to refer to the business of making a living, including ‘work’, ‘business’, or ‘living’, and the obligations of duty or calling, they employed yet other vocabularies when writing about more social or intellectual forms of work, namely their participation in intellectual or scientific activity and the pursuit of knowledge. Like many men of their generation, Parsons, Harrold and Cannon participated in a public and increasingly available world of science and letters. Parsons was an avid reader and noted purchasing and reading a variety of Enlightenment texts, including Newton’s Optics (1704) and Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, two volumes on the origin of the cosmos, published in the 1680s. He also conducted amateur experiments. In one entry, Parsons noted having ‘spent a good part of this day in filling thermometers to a proper height and sealing them’.34 Cannon and Harrold shared a similar interest in learning and books. To describe this intellectual or scientific labour, diarists used the word ‘imploy’ or ‘employment’. John Cannon, who stole time away from his agricultural labour to read in the hedgerows, counted reading as one of his many ‘employments’.35 Parsons described being ‘imploy’d as usual in drawing’ and later being occupied by ‘my own private imploy – reading (just now) Newton’s Optics – copying some of Worlidge’s Etchings’.36 It might be tempting to classify reading and amateur science as forms of leisure, distinctive from making a living. However, if the ability to make a living depended not only upon the act of production, but on the cultivation of an environment and a social status in which such production would be possible, then the definition of ‘work’ might be expanded further to include not only forms of labour that were not paid, but also forms of leisure that were not merely pleasure. For the three diarists, work was not only any activity which generated income, or provided an alternative to income, but was also understood to be a social practice that generated status. The different vocabularies and languages used by diarists to describe how they spent their days complicate historical definitions of ‘work’. Rather than distinguishing between work and leisure, paid and unpaid work, or work that took place domestically or was external to the home, the diarists described their tasks in terms of a more diffuse understanding of reward that took issues of fulfilment and status into account alongside material gain. From one perspective, books served important economic functions as material assets and forms of investment or savings. Collecting books might be conceptualized as a financial strategy. As repositories of value, books, like other material objects, could be exchanged and sold at crucial moments in the credit cycle. During moments of financial crisis, Cannon noting making arrangements to have books appraised and sold.37 Harrold borrowed, loaned, read and reflected upon his printed material, but he also conceptualized his book trading in terms of profits and losses. He used his diary as a space both to copy out passages from historical and religious texts and to carefully account for what he purchased and sold, noting profits and losses. In one entry, reflecting on a recent purchase and on the state of his library, Harrold wrote that he ‘Bought 16 books for self and more. Bought 8 for others [including] Samuel Oakes and John Whitworth. Sold 2 for good profit again to WD and Laurence’.38 From a different perspective, as important as their concrete value, books provided the diarists with a means of acquiring knowledge. By the late eighteenth century, as John Rule asserts, men saw skill as a possession. Earlier in the century, the three diarists seemed to commodify their knowledge in similar terms. The property of knowledge was essential to credit and could be commodified, sold, or marshalled into forms of work. As John Money has suggested, knowledge and the ability to talk, listen and remember ‘amounted to an exchangeable fund which served as the specie of a commercial sociability … knowledge ceased to be simply a medium of exchange to be used for temporal advantage and became a very personal possession’.39 John Cannon was introduced to knowledge as a saleable commodity early in life. While visiting an ale house, his friend Stephen Bush asked an excise officer, Mr Bosley, ‘if he would sell his trade for he would buy it’, to which Bosley replied that he would teach them’ his trade for forty shillings each.40 Cannon clearly saw the acquisition of knowledge as a form of investment that would help him on a path towards upward mobility. Later in life, knowledge became a primary source of credit and employment. He survived through what he called ‘employment at intervals’, which consisted of charging fees for ‘forms of writing and accounting’.41 Knowledge, Status and Title Thinking about reading and intellectual pursuits as a form of work disrupts the status load carried by occupational title. Even if we acknowledge occupational titles to be fictions in the world of work, we often regard them as indications of status and lineage.42 However, diaries suggest that in the eyes of middling people, a title was not necessarily the most elevated form of social standing that a man could claim from his labour. The three diarists derived status from work, separately from their occupational titles. For an upwardly-aspiring middling sort, a title could be seen as limiting and inflexible, while other forms of productive activity and the possession of knowledge as a form of property provided better opportunities for self-fashioning. Thomas Parsons had a particularly ambiguous relationship with his occupational title. As a guild-trained carver and the master of his workshop, occupation theoretically ought to have provided a positive source of local, civic status. However, Parsons wrote of his title as a burden and as a detriment to financial gain. In one entry, he even fantasized about casting his title off, reflecting ‘I find myself in a business that is not so well as to profit, as I think I cou’d get with the same attention by working as a journeyman’.43 In a later entry, he wrote of resenting the responsibility for management that came with being a master, implying that business prevented mobility by denying him time to acquire knowledge: ‘I starve my mind in the attainment of 40 or 50 pounds a year! And spend my thoughts and time about this little Business as if it was ten times as much’.44 Not only did Parsons gain more status from his intellectual endeavours, but in surmising that he might make more money as a journeyman, his comments suggest a feeling that in the rapidly changing building industry, his occupational title and status limited his ability to make a living. Both Parsons and Cannon expressed their own worth and judged the worth of others according to the demonstration of knowledge and skill rather than the claim to a title or the possession of wealth. Parsons took great pride in possessing a mind ‘superior to the crowd’, and he assessed other artisans according to the degrees to which they possessed knowledge, at one point criticizing ‘illiterate tradesmen’. His capacity for intellectual pursuits allowed him to distinguish himself from his workmen. Parsons wrote of one of his apprentices that he had ‘the Mind of a country fellow who has never perhaps thought of reading etc but plods on in one contracted sphere, [and] will with great difficulty make any considerable attainment’.45 Cannon judged himself and others according to similar co-ordinates, noting especially the possession of knowledge and literacy. He wrote disparagingly of ‘Mechanicks such as Black Smiths, Tanners, Taylors, Chandlers, Woolcombers etc. whose learning is so rife [indiscriminate] that they could as well distinguish the wrong end of a Warrant uppermost as the right way’.46 Participation in scientific enquiry was an important means of claiming status. As Henry French suggests, the qualities of science overlapped with the qualities of genteel status, reinforcing one another. Establishing reputations as thinkers allowed middling men to step out of local and competitive estimations between craftsmen, based upon financial ability, business volume or civic responsibility.47 For Parsons, Cannon, and Harrold, though, I would argue that learning did even more. A reputation for knowledge provided a stable sense of self and credit that transcended the precariousness of work, which included not only multiple employments, but financial insecurity and a changing occupational landscape. Cannon understood the condition of moving from job to job as being insecure. Later, reflecting on his career trajectory in 1734, he wrote that ‘from a schoolboy I became a plowboy, from a plowboy an Exciseman from an Exciseman a Maltster from a Maltster to an almost nothing except a Schoolmaster’.48 In this insecure world, reading provided a point of continuity. As he reflected, ‘for all these my hard and laborious employments I never slighted or disregarded my books, the study of which augmented and much increased my understanding’. John Money suggests that reading and writing provided Cannon, as a self-described ‘tennis-ball of fortune’, with a way to convince himself that he was not an ‘almost nothing’.49 Rather than looking upwards and aspiring towards gentility, the pursuit of knowledge was part of a descending gaze and an effort to avoid downward social mobility. For Parsons, the pursuit of knowledge was a means of coping with a changing artisanal landscape. During his coming of age as a stonecutter, the professional status of artisans was put under threat by a newly professionalized artistic culture that depended on drawing status distinctions between the artist and the craftsman. British artists attempted to carve out a new identity for themselves, refuting the notion that they were little better than ordinary mechanics.50 Emergent British theories of painting defined painting as a liberal art and an intellectual activity, which sat in distinct contrast to the craftsman’s manual labour. This idea was reflected in texts like Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, where he distinguished between the ‘liberal professional’ who ‘works under the direction of principle’, and the ‘mechanical trade’, which was carried out by men of ‘narrow comprehension and mechanical performance’ in obedience to ‘vulgar and trite rules’.51 The capacity for judgement, or taste, set the artist and the craftsman apart. These theories both created professional distinctions and had social and civic consequences, denigrating the craftsman in particularly gendered ways. While the artist was cast as the enfranchized citizen or the independent man, the craftsman-mechanic was depicted as servile. Parsons penned his diary in 1769, the same year that the Royal Academy was founded: an institution that was central to the professionalization of the arts.52 Parsons’s diary provided a space for him to engage with these discourses, and to position and account for his labour against the central features of artistry versus craft that formed the intellectual and cultural context for his work. He went to great lengths to claim an aptitude for judgement and taste. Self-instruction through reading and amateur experimentation took him beyond the ‘narrow interests’ of mechanics. He wrote of experimenting with materials, for example melting glass and bringing it into a paste. Gaining a deeper understanding of the scientific qualities of his materials differentiated his labour from that of the humble craftsman bellow him. This self-fashioning through intellectual pursuits went hand-in-hand with his attitudes towards manual labour. He wrote of disliking manual labour, and though his work was very often manual, he rarely emphasized his physical attributes, such as bodily strength, when discussing his work. Only when recounting an accident in which his hand was injured while moving a statue did Parsons acknowledge the importance of his material body to his working identity. Recounting the incident, he wrote of being ‘very much vexed because I know ‘twou’d hinder my working a long time’.53 Office-holding constituted another form of unpaid work that is crucial to account for when we consider male status and identity. As householders, Harrold, Cannon and Parsons were three of the some 400,000 individuals in eighteenth-century England who were expected to assume civic responsibilities, and who made up the pool from which parish officers were drawn.54 All three diarists were designated as ‘inhabitants’, a status signifying that an individual was a ratepayer, which carried connotations that he or she possessed a material stake in the parish community.55 Harrold was elected as a muzzler ‘of mastiff dogs and bitches’ in 1713. Cannon referred periodically to his duties as ‘officer’ and parish accountant. According to Henry French, assuming these civic roles at the parish level was one of the defining elements of middling social identity, which distinguished individuals as ‘chief inhabitants’.56 The experiences of undertaking civic responsibilities, as described by the three diarists, suggest that they could indeed be important sources of status. Harrold noted when others had been elected for Leet Court, as well as the occasions when he attended and who else was there.57 But just as occupational title had a limited bearing on status, so the impact of office holding was partial. The diaries suggest a slightly different urban middling relationship with the state than the rural world of the parish described by French. First, relying on parish office as the main indicator of status leaves out middling dissenters, who were increasingly numerous in the eighteenth century. Thomas Parsons, a Baptist dissenter, recounted undertaking civic responsibilities within the national dissenting community rather than the parish, including visiting, caring for the ill, money-lending and welcoming travelling ministers.58 Second, office-holding and the tasks associated with this role competed with other forms of work as indicators of status. Harrold’s diary gives the distinct impression that civic tasks were something that he was co-opted into, and which called him away from more fulfilling or profitable work. As Craig Horner suggests, civic posts had different levels of status. While office-holding could indicate rate-paying status, a civic title could also reflect or imply low standing in town society. Civic duties sometimes came in the form of paid work, conferred on individuals as a form of quasi-charity. Thus, when elected ‘dog musiller’, Harrold missed the swearing-in ceremony, for which he was fined.59 Masculine Independence and the Life-cycle Work and working life had a crucial relationship to one of the central features of eighteenth-century masculine identity: independence.60 In turn, a man’s capacity for independence depended upon his life-cycle position. While historians have long recognized the importance of marital status to women’s employment opportunities, the importance of life-cycle to male labour is less well conceptualized. In its simplest form, work created the income that allowed men to claim a reputation for self-sufficiency, which was understood in terms of being able to maintain oneself without relying on others. By the eighteenth century, maintenance in terms of income came to constitute one of the primary means by which many people claimed their status.61 Income and self-sufficiency also supported male gender identities within the household, allowing men to claim the ideal of provisioning, and in turn, to benefit from the dividends of patriarchy. All three diarists earned a comfortable though modest subsistence for tradesmen of the time, earning between fifty and seventy pounds per year, which placed them squarely within the lower bounds of the ‘middling’ in terms of income. If income provided the basis for independence, this independence was not secure. All three diarists fretted frequently about paying their debts, and feared potential failure. Harrold often had difficulty paying rent, noting in one entry that he was forced to sell his grey mare in order to satisfy his landlord.62 Parsons agonized about his financial obligations, noting in one entry ‘am in debt and know not how to pay. This gives me great uneasiness – what a multiplicity of concerns have I to employ my thoughts!’.63 Just as divine providence could bestow wealth, so it could take riches away. Debt combined temporal and religious anxieties. As Harrold reflected, ‘the world and the things of the world are mutable’.64 In October of 1713, he thanked God for ‘tolerable business’ and noted ‘I live very comfortablay’. By the next month, he would write that he was ‘ill set for money. Very dull business … A great rent and little trade, so that I’m in great straite what to do’.65 Given the fragility of financial self-sufficiency, work’s contribution to an independent status was conceptualized less in terms of material gain, and more by the relationships that working life conferred. Work was a social practice, and the social relations structuring and structured by eighteenth-century working lives were as important to a reputation for independent status as the tasks that individuals undertook or the material benefits that they derived from productive activity. Working life placed lower-middling men into relationships with family, apprentices and other craftsmen that were based on dependence, status and hierarchy. Thinking about work in terms broader than monetized labour allows us to probe the limitations of the eighteenth century’s independent economic man. Just as life-cycle position had a bearing on women’s work, the kinds of relationships that men established through work, and the degree to which these supported claims to independence, depended upon their place in the life-cycle. Thomas Parsons devoted many lines in his diary to hierarchical relationships of work with his father. Aged twenty-five at the time he wrote the diary, Parsons served nominally as the ‘master’ of his workshop, but found himself in a transitional life-cycle stage, in the process of taking over the business from his father. Parsons therefore occupied a liminal space between independence and dependence; between patriarchy and subordination. He recounted his father’s criticisms over the management of his business and the ways that he spent his time. Fashioning a working self that was independent proved a constant source of anxiety for Parsons, who often wrote about his desire for a different means of making a living: ‘I have often thought of, and wish’d for some other way of getting my bread, so as to be detach’d from my Father’.66 Similarly, Cannon complained of his parents’ meddling in his employment opportunities. He believed that parents should allow their children to ‘seek honourable employments and honest callings’ suitable to their skills, and resolved in 1720 ‘to get in some employ that should separate me from them a good distance’.67 Parsons’s and Cannon’s experiences make clear that while the household family provided a source of security and the means to achieve a patriarchal status, the collusion of work and family also posed challenges for men in subordinate positions as they sought to establish independent working identities. Diaries served young men as spaces in which to fashion an independent self by deploying a language of paternalist discourse. In describing his work, Parsons claimed independence by placing himself within a hierarchal working relationship above journeymen, apprentices and other dependents, which gave him a partial claim to patriarchal dividends. For example, as a nominal patriarch, he expected to ‘gain credit’ from his journeymen. As studies of credit and reputation have made clear, male reputation was derived from men’s own actions as well as the positive and negative reputation of dependents and family.68 Upon hiring a journeyman, he reflected that this individual would ‘prove a workman and a credit to his Master who intends also to be his instructor’.69 As men transitioned from positions of dependence and youth to positions of potential patriarchal authority, the complex relationship between work, family and independence changed. Male working identities came to be constructed in relation to the work of their dependents. Though conduct literature placed a heavy emphasis on the ideals of patriarchal provision, we know that household economies did not in reality rely solely on the capacity of a patriarchal bread-winner. Furthermore, wives were not merely helpers, but in many cases held their own independent occupations.70 The extent, however, to which men recognized the contributions of their dependents and partners, and how they made sense of them in the formulation of their own occupational identities is more opaque. On the one hand, as Karen Harvey asserts, household management was a co-operative endeavour. On the other, the roles of women as central to household earnings would seem to betray the ideal of the independent, autonomous man. As Joanne Bailey suggests, ‘co-dependency worked against male autonomy’.71 Tensions could arise between the idea that maintaining a livelihood was a co-operative undertaking, and the notion that work was essential to establishing individual identities. Diaries suggest that in non-institutional contexts, men recognized and even expected women to provide household labour. The expectation that a wife’s work would contribute to the financial well-being of the household started at courtship. For the young Thomas Parsons, anxieties about finding a suitable marriage partner were bound up with concerns over solvency and financial competency. He judged the women that he met according to their skill. Similarly, the widowed wigmaker Edmund Harrold wrote about his decision to remarry after his first wife’s death as being bound up not only in loneliness, but in the need for a new wife to contribute to household provisioning. Fretting over the decision of whether to marry or not, he wrote ‘I’m much concerned about my affairs’. In describing one potential courtship partner he used a language of management: ‘she [is] a maneger, but is manag’d. She wants to be satisfied’.72 Harrold’s comments suggest that to some extent, men subscribed to the notion identified by Ågren and her colleagues as the two-supporter model: husband and wife needed to work together to support their common livelihood.73 Within lower-middling households, business decision-making and oeconomic management were joint endeavours. Harrold’s economic relationship with his wife might be described as co-operative. In his diary, he referred to Sarah as his ‘assistant’. He read his business letters to her before sending them. Decisions related to renting lodgings in their household were made jointly or deferred to his wife. Sarah was intimately involved in debt collection and the decision to ‘dun’ those who were obligated to the Harrold household. She also had input into his exchange decisions. In 1712, Harrold ‘swapt 1 wig with Rob Parley of Whitehaven for 1 wig and 2 boxes, long ones, of wood’. Apparently responding to her discontent with the bargain, he later noted having ‘swapt and unswapt with Robert Parley to please wife’.74 If men like Harrold shared household provisioning and decision-making with their wives, and though we might describe their relationships as co-operative, the task of managing and keeping track of household production seemed to be a more masculine endeavour. Accounting linked men’s everyday practices to notions of masculine oeconomy.75 In the pages of his diary, Harrold accounted for his wife’s labour alongside his own, keeping track of how ‘busie’ she was, and what kinds of work she completed during the day, even where this work was independent of his wigmaking business. On 25 July he noted his wife’s progress in making bread: ‘About ¼ past my wife was kneading and she had teemed the barm’ [meaning drained off the yeast]. He noted how productive she was, writing in one entry that ‘My wife made all her mak’ [meaning that she was arranging the house], and in another that she cleaned out stock while he worked.76 Male oeconomic management might seem contradictory to previous accounts showing that women were often responsible for household management. Marriage, by some accounts, gave women authority over the household and power to command the labour of others.77 However, control over economic resources and household authority were also clearly part of gender difference. If we were to observe the household diary of a woman, we would be unlikely to find her accounting for her husband’s work. Harrold benefited from the task of oeconomic management, which gave him power over the household. However, diaries suggest that household management roles did not come easily. Accounting was negotiated between husband and wife, and men were judged according to the skill and success with which accounting was performed. Wives expected their husbands to manage effectively and questioned their abilities to do so. Harrold wrote that Sarah ‘asked questions about books’.78 In the Cannon household, management was not John’s sole prerogative. He wrote that his wife ‘consented’ to his selling property in order to pay off their debts, and she criticized his ability to effectively manage their household resources. In 1728, when the family was in particularly bad straits, Susanna told him ‘that she and the children must spin only to support such a lazy, indolent fellow as I was … who had for a great many times past had a very fair opportunity to have made a sufficient provision for himself and his family but took no further care than for the present time, and that I riotously wasted that which might have been treasured up for future support’.79 Lower-middling households were clearly joint ventures. However, we must be careful not to over-emphasize the extent to which this sense of co-operation influenced male work identities. Men acknowledged the work of their wives in household accounting. However, when they reflected on how work gave them status and satisfaction, the work of the household as a whole was rarely in mind, only their own. This could be partly related to the individualistic nature of diary-writing. Diaries served as spaces for what Jason Scott-Warren calls ‘makinge up’, or what Matthew Kadane refers to as ‘watchfulness’, an examination of the self which was conceptualized both as a spiritual process meant to cultivate personal piety, and as a form of more secular constructions of industriousness.80 The diary as a form of record keeping encouraged an obsession with selfhood. As Edmund Harrold described, ‘it is every mans duty to examin and communicate’. He went on to explain, ‘from this way of living springs al[l] our comforts of long life riches and honours, a good name, and peace of conscience’.81 The diarists’ appreciation of female and co-operative productivity was made most clear in cases of indisposition. In Cannon’s case, his wife’s contributions became apparent when he fell ill and was unable to provision the household. While he was in ‘a low condition’, his family depended upon the labour of his wife, who ‘took up the trade of selling bread for the bakers and butter for the dairy folks, in which she continued about two years’.82 Although Harrold accounted for his wife’s activities frequently in his diary, the real extent of her financial contributions was only acknowledged after her death, when he was forced to assume tasks that she once carried out, or to hire help to perform them. He wrote of being ‘busie in the house’, and later of having ‘both shops to tend now, all by plunges’ [in a hurry or with difficulty].83 Five days after her burial, Harrold hired a housekeeper. He was forced to take on new by-employments, lodged strangers, and began selling off household goods. He enlisted his sister in law, Martha, to help to manage his daughter Anna’s education and bringing up. As time progressed Harrold fought to maintain his household single-handed and support his young children. He spiralled into debt. Without Sarah, he found himself ‘in great straite what to do’.84 Over the course of the life-cycle, working identity continued to change. Just as working identity shifted in the transition from youth to middle age, and as men assumed positions as heads of household, so their identities shifted again in old age as their ability to work declined. Because work was so important to male selfhood, this transition into old age poses conceptual problems for the historian. When men stopped working, how did their occupational identities change? Some men maintained their occupational identities after retirement. Keith Thomas suggests that unlike today, retirement in the early modern period did not require a complete disengagement from occupational life.85 However, by the eighteenth century, it came to be expected that older men would withdraw from their professions, or at least hire additional help.86 Susannah Ottaway has argued that in eighteenth-century England, self-sufficiency and autonomy were the central ideals of old age, shaping attitudes about whether or not the aged should labour. The view that individuals should continue working until they reached decrepitude was matched by a developing attitude that it was acceptable, or even desirable, for those of middling status who had achieved independence to retire from work.87 Occupational plurality facilitated the transition into different occupations later in life. Men might take up work that relied less on physical strength and agility. Thus, Thomas Parsons’s ageing father Robert, once the master of the stone-cutting workshop, followed spiritual aspirations and began lecturing as a Baptist minister. Diaries suggest that for middle-rank men who possessed independent businesses, old age seemed to involve less a complete stepping away from work, and more a long period of semi-independence as they handed over some tasks and responsibilities to younger family members. Parsons’s diary recounts father and son working together. In January, he described being ‘employed myself with my Father in getting the pieces of timber from the top of the orchard to the pit’. Later that month, he showed his father a copy of a popular print, a gesture that led to an argument about taste. Thomas Parsons’s father continued to maintain oversight of the stone-cutting workshop, which prevented his son from claiming full independence. They constantly disputed tasks and working methods, as Thomas attempted to assert his independence. In one typical entry, he noted that ‘Father seem’d chagrin’d at refusing to comply with his proposal – telling me that was but one among many instances in which his mentioning a thing was a sufficient reason for my objecting to it’.88 Other diaries suggest similar practices of partial retirement. When the grocer William Stout of Lancaster handed over his shop to his apprentice, John Troughton, he maintained oversight of the business from a distance and returned to manage affairs when Troughton fell into bankruptcy. Older men like Stout felt that maintaining partial control was a responsibility towards the interpersonal obligations that he built over his career. As Stout reflected, as former owner of the business and the person who secured Troughton’s credit, ‘I thought my selfe obliged to use my endevors to make the most for the crediters’.89 Conclusion Work was, for lower middling men, a central feature of identity and of status. However, this status was dependent neither solely or even principally upon occupational title, nor upon the income derived from productive activities. In order to truly understand what work meant to the people who performed it, we have to start somewhere else than with occupational titles or incomes.90 Working identities were derived from a more complex accounting for the different activities that men undertook during their working lives. In order to understand the functions that work played in constructions of masculine selfhood, we require a broader definition of what constituted ‘work’. This definition must take into account activities that did not generate income and which might not even be considered straightforwardly ‘productive’, but which provided men with a means of developing and asserting skill and status. In a credit economy, cultivating a reputation for skill and status was inseparable from ‘making a living’. Early modern working lives, then, challenge economic definitions of value. The ‘value’ of a job was not only conceptualized in financial terms. It was also social, reputational, and fulfilling. Men understood their work as an undertaking that established skill, status, independence and self-worth, in addition to being a productive activity to provide maintenance or to generate income. ‘Work’ could include activities that were not paid, but also leisure that was not just pleasure. Men like Parsons, Harrold and Cannon clearly understood their work as encompassing a broad range of activities, and they employed complex vocabularies, using the words ‘work’, ‘business’ and ‘employment’ to describe the different but interrelated benefits conferred by their different forms of work. The benefits of work, forged in a precarious environment, could be financial, but they could also be social, related to public reputation and to relationships of power forged especially within the household. In contributing to a man’s broader sense of worth, different forms of work could have inverse or contradictory relationships. Thomas Parsons made most of his money from his stone-cutting business rather than his intellectual pursuits, but it was from his participation in an intellectual world of scientific experimentation that he derived the most status. Furthermore, work did not only confer ‘benefits’. Given the precariousness of working lives, including financial instability, changing occupational landscapes, and potential crises of various kinds, work was not necessarily a positive source of identity for lower-middling men. For upwardly-aspirational men in different places in the life-cycle, occupational title and position could be limiting. While work could contribute to independence, it could equally challenge or undermine male autonomy. Work was a social practice performed in co-operation with or in relation to other people. Relational meanings of work changed over the course of the life-cycle. For younger or subordinate men, working practices confirmed dependent status. As men transitioned into positions of patriarchy, managing other people’s work within the household became an important feature of independence. Finally, in old age, men negotiated their status as working life slowed or stopped. A better understanding of male work and its values can be achieved by applying the insights derived from studies of female labour to male experiences of labour. We must also consider men’s work in relation to the productive activities undertaken by their wives and by other members of the household. For most married men, work was performed in relation to and in co-operation with their wives, which might challenge the ideal of masculine independence and provision. In this sense, the relationship between male and female labour, and the ways in which working identities contributed to gender difference, emerge as both historical and historiographical problems. Economic identities are central to gender difference. Work, access to resources, and control over wealth have been central to defining what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman. But we have perhaps been too ready to heed the fictions of the archive that link masculinities with single occupations, and that make male work seem so very different from female work. While acknowledging that men and women worked in different sectors and undertook different tasks, and that female work was often remunerated at lower rates, a broader understanding of male work tempers the influence that labour had upon gender difference in early modern Britain. In an effort to decouple work from occupational title, previous studies have drawn a distinction between what people did and who they were.91 I would argue that these two concepts should remain intimately bound. What men did was crucial to the sense of self, in other words, to who they were. However, if we broaden the definition of work, the importance of occupational title fades, and it emerges as one of many relational categories. Multiple employments were central to middling male identities. Tawny Paul is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. She holds a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Edinburgh. She is interested broadly in gender and economic culture in early modern Britain, and is the author of a forthcoming monograph on debtors’ prisons and downward mobility in the eighteenth century. While focusing on the early modern period, she believes that historical perspectives help us to understand and challenge financial and gender inequalities in the present. Her recent work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Economic History Society. The author wishes to thank Mark Hailwood and the anonymous readers at History Workshop Journal for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. Aspects of the paper were presented at the Pacific Coast Conference for British Studies at the Huntington Library, April 2016, and to the ‘Society, Culture & Belief, 1500–1800’ seminar at the Institute for Historical Research in London, November 2016. Many thanks to the participants for both lively discussion and insightful questions. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 The Diary of Edmund Harrold, Wigmaker of Manchester, 1712–15, ed. Craig Horner, Aldershot, 2008 (henceforth Harrold Diary): 1, 3, 21, 25 Sept. 1713; 3 Oct. 1712; 11 Sept. 1712; 27 April 1713; 5 May 1713; 23, 24 Nov. 1714; 20–3 Oct. 1713. 2 Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life, Oxford and New York, 2009, p. 106; Mark Overton, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750, London, 2004, pp. 74, 76; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, Oxford, 2015, pp. 149–90. For an argument against the prevalence of by-employments, see Sebastian A. J. Keibek and Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Early Modern Rural By-employments’, Agricultural History Review 61, December 2013, pp. 244–81. 3 Harrold Diary, 15 Oct. 1713. 4 Keibek and Shaw-Taylor, ‘Early Modern Rural By-employments’. 5 Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Göran Rydén, ‘The Diversity of Work’, in Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society, ed. Maria Ågren, Oxford, 2016, p. 6. 6 Thomas, The Ends of Life, pp. 100–1; Mark Hailwood, ‘“The Honest Tradesman's Honour”: Occupational and Social Identity in Seventeenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) 24, 2014, pp. 79–103. 7 Guy Standing, The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class, London, 2011, p. 32; Deborah Fahy Bryceson, How Africa Works: Occupational Change, Identity and Morality, Rugby, 2010. 8 Harrold Diary, 21 Oct. 1712. 9 Malcolm Chase, Early Trade Unionism, Aldershot, 2000; Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, p. 268; Thomas, The Ends of Life, pp. 106–7; Brodie Waddell, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720, Woodbridge, 2012, p. 205. 10 Mary Prior, ‘Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500–1800’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior, London, 1985, p. 95. 11 Making a Living, Making a Difference, ed. Ågren, p. 4. The verb-oriented approach used in the ‘Gender and Work’ project identified active words in the historical record to collect people’s productive activities. This methodology has the advantage of emphasizing what people did rather than what they were called. 12 Keibek and Shaw-Taylor, ‘Early Modern Rural By-employments’, p. 250. 13 Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, p. 232; John Rule, ‘The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture’, in The Historical Meanings of Work , ed. Patrick Joyce, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 99–118. 14 Thomas Parsons, ‘Diary, 1769’, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, mssHM 62593 (henceforth ‘Parsons Diary’), 15 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, London, 1987. 16 For diaries as spaces for self-fashioning, see Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, Baltimore, 1989; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self, Cambridge MA, 1976; Hannah Barker, ‘Soul, Purse and Family’, Social History 33, February 2008, pp. 12–35; Elaine McKay, ‘English Diarists’, History 90, April 2005, pp. 191–212. 17 Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Books in the Bedchamber’, in Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 247–9; Matthew Kadane, ‘Self-discipline’, in In Praise of Ordinary People: Early Modern Britain and the Dutch Republic, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan, Basingstoke, 2013, pp. 267–9. 18 Scott-Warren, ‘Books in the Bedchamber’, pp. 247–9; Craig Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit’, in Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800, ed. Henry French and Jonathan Barry, Basingstoke, 2004, p. 172; Kadane, ‘Self-discipline’, pp. 267–9. 19 Rosemarie Fiebranz, Erik Lindberg, Jonas Lindström, and Maria Ågren, ‘Making Verbs Count’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 59, November 2011, pp. 273–93; Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, A Bitter Living, Oxford, 2003. 20 Margaret G. Reid, Economics of Household Production, New York, 1934. For the application of this definition, see ‘Adopting a New Methodological Approach to Early Modern Women's Work’, University of Exeter, https://earlymodernwomenswork.wordpress.com/the-project/ 21 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Forms of Capital’, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson, New York, 1986, pp. 46–58. For a discussion of the different forms of capital in an early modern British context, see Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, New Haven, 2000, pp. 290–6. 22 ‘Parsons Diary’, 27 Jan. 1769. 23 Harrold Diary, 13 March 1713. 24 Karen Harvey, The Little Republic, Oxford, 2012, pp. 33–43, 64–6. 25 Harrold Diary, 30 Nov. 1713. 26 ‘Parsons Diary’, 18 July, 1769. 27 Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort, Berkeley, 1996, pp. 34–40. 28 ‘Parsons Diary’, 15 Jan. 1769. 29 Waddell, God, Duty and Community, p. 98. 30 ‘Parsons Diary’, 16 Jan. 1769; 13 Feb. 1769. 31 Harrold Diary, 31 Aug. 1712. 32 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. 8. 33 Harrold Diary, 26 June 1712; 5 Aug. 1712; 20 Aug. 1712; 12 Sept. 1712; 14 May 1713; 27 Dec. 1712. 34 ‘Parsons Diary’, 30 Jan. 1769. 35 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. 36. 36 ‘Parsons Diary’, 30 Jan. 1769; 27 Jan. 1769. 37 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, pp. 500–1. 38 Harrold Diary, 31 Dec. 1713. 39 Rule, ‘The Property of Skill’; John Money, ‘Teaching in the Marketplace’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter, London and New York, 1993, p. 353. 40 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, pp. 57–8. 41 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. 180. 42 Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, p. 232. 43 ‘Parsons Diary’, 13 April 1769. 44 ‘Parsons Diary’, 13 March 1769. 45 ‘Parsons Diary’, 26 Jan. 1769. 46 John Cannon, quoted in Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit’, pp. 166–7. 47 Henry R. French, ‘“Ingenious & Learned Gentlemen”: Social Perception s and Self-Fashioning among Parish Elites in Essex, 1680–1740’, Social History 25, 2000, p. 60. 48 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. 174. 49 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. cxxviii. 50 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting, New Haven, 1986, pp. 16–17. 51 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark, New Haven (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art), 1975, pp. 93, 97, 117. Quoted in Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting, p. 15. 52 Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists, Oxford, 2003. See especially chaps 1–3. 53 ‘Parsons Diary’, 21 Feb. 1769. 54 David Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870, Basingstoke, 1997, p. 48. 55 Henry French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England 1600–1750, Oxford, 2007, p. 27. Edmund Harrold’s father Thomas was a tobacconist and served on the Manchester Court Leet. Edmund seems to have achieved less civic status than his father. Parish entries list him as a ‘barber’ and a ratepayer: Harrold Diary, pp. xi–xii. 56 French, The Middle Sort of People, pp. 94–120. 57 Harrold Diary, 24 Oct. 1712, 6 Oct. 1712. 58 ‘Parsons Diary’, 5 Jan. 1769, 23 May 1769, 8 June 1769. 59 Harrold Diary, pp. xxvi, 20–23 Oct. 1714. 60 Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man, Manchester, 2005. 61 Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, pp. 191, 274. 62 Harrold Diary, 30 Aug. 1714. 63 ‘Parsons Diary’, 27 Jan. 1769. 64 Harrold Diary, 30 Aug. 1712. 65 Harrold Diary, 15 Oct. 1713, 9 Oct. 1713; 28 Nov. 1713, 27–30 Dec. 1713. 66 ‘Parsons Diary’, 13 April 1769. 67 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. 57; Muldrew, ‘Class and Credit’, p. 163. 68 K. Tawny Paul, ‘Credit, Reputation, and Masculinity in British Urban Commerce’, Economic History Review 66, February 2013, p. 240. 69 ‘Parsons Diary’, 14 Feb. 1769. 70 Amy Erickson, ‘Married Women’s Occupations in Eighteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change 23: 2, 2008, pp. 267–307. 71 Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800, Cambridge, 2003, p. 199. 72 Harrold Diary, 25 May 1713, 5 March 1713. 73 Sofia Ling, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Christopher Pihl and Maria Ågren, ‘Marriage and Work: Intertwined Sources of Agency and Authority’, in Making a Living, ed. Maria Ågren, p. 81. 74 Harrold Diary, 17 Dec. 1712, 29 June 1712, 16 June 1712. 75 Harvey, Little Republic, pp. 65–98. 76 Harrold Diary, 25 July 1712, 22 Nov. 1712, 23 Feb. 1714. 77 Ling and others, ‘Marriage and Work’, p. 95. 78 Harrold Diary, 27 Sept. 1712. 79 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, pp. 172–3, 189. 80 Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Books in the Bedchamber’, pp. 247–9; Kadane, ‘Self-discipline’, pp. 267–9. 81 Harrold Diary, 5 Oct. 1713. 82 Chronicles of John Cannon, ed. Money, p. 189. 83 Harrold Diary, 19 Sept 1712. 84 Harrold Diary, 25 Nov. 1712, 29 Nov. 1712, 22 Dec. 1712, 30 Dec. 1712, 14 Jan. 1713, 31 Dec. 1712, 6 Jan. 1713. 85 Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 62, 1978, pp. 236–7. 86 Susannah R. Ottaway, The Decline of Life, Cambridge, 2007, p. 68. 87 Ottaway, Decline of Life, pp. 66–8. 88 ‘Parsons Diary’, 23 Jan. 1769, 30 Jan. 1769, 15 Jan. 1769. 89 William Stout, The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster, 1665–1752 (ed. Harland, 1851), ed. John D. Marshall, Manchester (Chetham Society), 1967, pp. 148–9. 90 Lindström, Fiebranz, and Rydén, ‘Diversity of Work’, p. 26. 91 Making a Living, Making a Difference, ed. Ågren. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Harrison, Henrietta

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbx060pmid: N/A

Delia Davin will be remembered by scholars above all for the book she wrote in the 1970s on the changes wrought by the Communist Party on women’s lives in the early years of People’s Republic of China. Like many of the best scholarly works, this book was the expression of things that Davin cared about at a very deep level, in this case the position of women in society and the impact of socialism in China. Davin’s appreciation of the tension between these two concerns grew out of a remarkable life story, which gave her work its great impact on subsequent scholarship and shaped her career as a scholar of Chinese society. View largeDownload slide Outside Haworth Parsonage, early 2016. Photo: Mary Jacobus View largeDownload slide Outside Haworth Parsonage, early 2016. Photo: Mary Jacobus Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976) took as its focus the alliance between the women’s movement in China and the Chinese Communist Party, ‘its aims, its problems, and its achievements’. Starting from the early Communist base areas in the 1930s and 40s she described the development of Communist Party policy on women. From the start, she argued, the Party subordinated what it called woman-work (funü gongzuo), that is to say work to change the position of women in society, to its goal of creating a communist state. Once that state was created and the Party had come to power women’s work was again subordinated, this time to issues of economic development. The main body of the book discusses the impact of this subordination in three areas: the introduction of new patterns of family life through the 1950 Marriage Law, rural women’s agricultural labour and especially the issue of equal pay, and urban women’s participation in the labour force and political life. Davin’s work covers the period up to to about 1960 and she argues that while there were undoubtedly considerable achievements that transformed women’s lives in many ways there were also institutional barriers to women’s progress within the Chinese Communist state. The issues that framed Woman-Work were the result of Davin’s political beliefs, while the distrust of grandiose Communist Party claims came out of her early experience living and working in China. She was born in Oxford to parents who had migrated from New Zealand. Her father Dan Davin was an editor for Oxford University Press and her childhood was a bohemian one lived among many of the literary figures of the day. She was also very conscious of the family’s Irish heritage and learnt Gaelic as a teenager, spending two summers studying and helping with the farm work in County Donegal, experiences that would later shape her attitude to the work-study schemes she found when she travelled to China. Back in Oxford she became involved in the radical causes of the day, dropped out of school, though she continued to study for her examinations, and at the age of seventeen married Bill Jenner, then an Oxford undergraduate studying Chinese. Inspired by ideas of the revolution in China, they wrote to the Chinese embassy asking for the opportunity to work in China. In 1963, in the aftermath of both the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward, the young couple arrived in China where Bill Jenner took up a job as a translator at the Foreign Languages Press and Delia, who knew no Chinese at this stage, became an English teacher at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. Letters from Peking (1967) an edited version of her letters to her parents during this period paints an engaging picture of her youthful enthusiasm for the revolution, great commitment to her students, instinctive cynicism about some of the political rhetoric she was living with, and considerable naivety over the events of the previous few years. It also omits, in this case for very good reasons, the friendship she made at this time that was probably most influential in shaping her attitude to China. This was with Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, who were well known literary translators and Bill Jenner’s colleagues at the Foreign Languages Press. Yang Xianyi came from a wealthy Chinese family and had studied Classics at Oxford, where he met Gladys Tayler who had been born to missionary parents in China. The Yangs had returned to China during the Second World War, and although they had stayed to work after the Communist revolution their political outlook and knowledge of events in China was far more sophisticated than that of the enthusiastic young communist cadres whom Delia was teaching. Delia left China in 1965 shortly before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution to go to the University of Leeds where she studied for a degree in Chinese and History and then began the doctoral dissertation on the position of women in China that was to develop into Woman-Work. The Department of Chinese at the University of Leeds, to which Delia was to devote much of the rest of her life, had been established for the study of contemporary China, and its atmosphere was very different from the classical emphasis of most degree programmes in Chinese at that time. However, Delia’s dissertation was supervised by Don Rimington, a traditionally trained Sinologist, and its argument was all backed up by careful textual research using Chinese policy documents, newspapers, journals and magazines. This combination was hugely important because of the context in which the book was published: 1976 was the year in which Mao Zedong died. Only a very few Western scholars had been able to visit China extensively since the Communist revolution in 1949, and those few had almost all been hand-picked by the Chinese Communist Party for their political beliefs. Their writings tended towards the excessively rosy. Outside China much scholarship was influenced by powerful anti-communist feeling and often based on émigré interviews. Although it is hard to remember now, this was a period when people still debated whether there had in fact been a major famine between 1959 and 1961. Woman-Work was one of the first studies of Communist China to balance the idealism of the communist project in which so many believed against the real problems of its implementation. The conclusions of Woman-Work became the orthodoxy of the field for scholars of Chinese women, with the result that they are now the arguments against which a new generation of scholars test their own ideas. This new generation has access to a wealth of detail from the newly-opened local archives, which makes entirely different types of scholarship possible. However, as is so often the case these responses have also shown up the validity of many of Davin’s early conclusions. Davin returned to China in 1975 and spent another year working in Beijing as well as time in Japan, France and India. Then she settled down for several years at the University of York teaching first Economic History and then Women’s Studies, before returning in 1988 to the University of Leeds where she became Professor of Chinese and ended her career as much-loved head of the Department of Chinese Studies from 1997 to 2001. Her marriage with Bill Jenner had ended in 1968 after the birth of her first child Lucy. She later married Andy Morgan, with whom she had children Sian and Gareth, and then Owen Wells who survives her. In these years she continued to write and publish despite increasing numbers of other commitments. Most notably she published a survey of Internal Migration in Contemporary China (1999) and a short biography of Mao Zedong (2013). Both were welcomed by those in the field as incisive and clearly written studies, but neither had anything like the impact of her first book. She continued to travel to China, to be interested in every aspect of its society and history, and to be engaged with the friends she had made in her youth. However, she did not much like the commercialism that permeated so many aspects of life in China beginning in the 1980s. I first met Delia in 1998 when we were both commentators at the Wiles lectures at Belfast University given that year by Steve Smith on comparisons between the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Shortly afterwards she chaired the committee that appointed me at the University of Leeds, and since I had no teaching experience she arranged for me to co-teach all my courses with her, explaining meanwhile everything from how to mark examinations to the intricacies of university finances. She remained, as she had been in her youth, an extraordinarily committed teacher. She is said to have once set off with the department secretary to the shared house of an undergraduate, whom she knew to be diabetic and who had failed to turn up to an examination. They found him in a diabetic coma and delivered him to the hospital. At the weekends, she would invite me to stay at her home in Ilkley, where she and Owen were wonderfully hospitable to a guest who, at first, did little but sleep, and where we talked about all aspects of life in China, its history, society and politics. Not only did she have endlessly fascinating recollections of life in China in the 1960s and 70s, but she also had a wonderful collection of books and ephemera from that period. Many of the most interesting of these she donated before her death to the Bodleian; they included a box of flexidisks of Chinese patriotic songs from the 1960s, a traditional lunar calendar used to convey communist propaganda in the 1960s which now forms the core of a new collection on this theme, as well as books and magazines she bought when she was in China at the time of the trial of Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) and in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen protests of 1989. Delia Davin was one of a generation of women who pioneered the serious study of women’s lives in modern China. Marilyn Young and Christina Gilmartin, two of her good friends from that generation have also sadly recently died. These women formed a network of friendship that supported younger scholars and were extraordinarily generous. Together they shaped the field of modern Chinese history. And the issues that Davin addressed in her work and her politics of how far social change should be subordinated to economic development goals have not gone away, either for China or for our own society. Henrietta Harrison works on the social and cultural history of modern China. She is Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford and Stanley Ho Tutor in Chinese at Pembroke College. She has published The Making of the Republican Citizen: Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911–1929 (Oxford, 2000), The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village 1857–1942 (Stanford, 2005), and The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013). © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Clarke, Ben

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dby005pmid: N/A

The poor have returned to popular political discourse in Britain and the United States, not as the gravediggers of capitalism but as its last line of defence. The radical working class has become the reactionary white working class. The prefix marks an illegitimate privilege that identifies them with power and enables them to be held responsible for the reversal of the progress they formerly embodied. Reporting on the election of Donald Trump in The New York Times the day after it happened, Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro described it as ‘a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters’.1 Commentators represented Brexit in similar terms; as Zoe Williams observed, the dominant narrative insists that the success of the Leave campaign was due to ‘the white working classes, the disenfranchised and unheeded, the voters hidden on estates’.2 For numerous people the two events were connected by the perceived centrality of this group to both; Jim Tankersley argued in The Washington Post that Trump’s election ‘was a ‘Brexit’ moment in America, a revolt of working-class whites’.3 This narrative was established before Trump’s election and embraced by the candidate himself; at a rally in Virginia he assured his supporters with characteristic eloquence that the vote was ‘gonna be Brexit plus plus plus’.4 There is one major objection to these explanations of Trump’s victory and the Brexit vote: they are not true. As Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu pointed out, ‘white non-Hispanic voters without college degrees making below the median household income made up only 25 percent of Trump voters’.5 Clinton attracted fewer working-class voters than Obama, winning fifty-two percent of voters in households earning less than $50,000 a year as opposed to the sixty percent who backed Obama and only fifty-one percent of union households, but she still received the support of a majority of both groups. She also won the popular vote by a considerable margin, despite the widespread recognition that her proposals offered little of substance to working-class voters. Her failure to secure the presidency was due to a multitude of factors, including the electoral college system and an inept, complacent campaign that led to a low turnout amongst many traditional Democratic supporters, including the poor. In contrast, those from households earning over $100,000 exerted a disproportionate influence; whilst they made up just seventeen percent of the population in 2016 they accounted for thirty-three percent of voters.6 Racism and misogyny certainly played a part in Clinton’s defeat, but despite middle-class efforts at displacement these are not peculiar to the poor, and the result cannot simply be attributed to the white working class, let alone the manufacturing and extractive workers on whom so much attention has focused. Trump secured almost 2.9 million fewer votes than Hilary Clinton, but he still received the support of 62,979,879 Americans.7 As Christopher Ingraham pointed out, the entire coal industry only employed ‘76,572 people in 2014, the latest year for which data is available’, a figure that includes ‘not just miners but also office workers, sales staff and all of the other individuals who work at coal-mining companies’.8 Trump was not carried to power by angry coal miners in West Virginia; there just aren’t enough of them. His election, like that of his Republican predecessors, depended on the votes of ‘older, suburban, white, middle-class, small businesspeople, professionals, and managers’,9 just as the Leave campaign in Britain depended upon ‘affluent, older southerners’.10 It is obviously important to understand why both movements were able to attract working-class people who had been expected to vote against them, but, as Charlie Post argues, Trump’s election is better understood as a ‘radical, right-wing, middle-class insurgency’11 than a working-class one. In this context, the question is not whether the U.S. presidential election or Brexit vote can be adequately explained as ‘a revolt of working-class whites’ (they can’t), but what interests this account serves and what cultural narratives have enabled its acceptance. One striking feature of the current hostility to the white working class is that it is shared by commentators on the right and some who see themselves as on the left. In a widely-discussed article in National Review, Kevin Williamson argued that ‘the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump’ is ‘[m]orally indefensible’, a ‘dysfunctional’ group ‘in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles’. Wholly responsible for their condition (‘Nothing happened to them’), they are a product of moral failings demonstrated by their inability to sustain ‘traditional family’12 structures and refusal to adjust to economic change. Despite obvious differences, this well-worn conservative narrative overlaps with what Owen Jones calls a ‘new liberal bigotry’ that claims it is ‘OK to hate the white working class’ because they are ‘a bunch of racist bigots’.13 In both instances, stereotypes, received orthodoxies, and a desire for simple solutions work to prevent empathy with the working class or an understanding of its condition, constructing it instead as a regrettable historical residue. Redefined in terms of ethnicity and thereby separated from other low-paid workers, ‘working-class whites’ become a group it is acceptable, even laudable, to condemn because they have brought their deprivation upon themselves and are in any case racist, misogynistic and homophobic. The prosperous, who are best positioned to weather Trump’s time in office, can attribute the injustices and incompetence of his administration to the support of those most likely to suffer under it, people whose priorities and prejudices Trump supposedly embodies. In the coming years, the working class will get the blame whilst the upper middle and upper classes will get the tax breaks. One reason for the parallels between ‘liberal bigotry’ and its more familiar right-wing forms is that both draw upon long-established stereotypes of poor white people. In the United States, these coalesce around the image of ‘white trash’, an idea shaped by the ethnic, economic and regional divisions that still structure the country. As David Nichols argues, there are close connections between ideas of ‘white trash’, ‘the Australian conception of the bogan’,14 and ‘the British phenomenon of the chav’,15 but the relation between class and race has a particular history in the United States defined, most obviously and importantly, by the experience of slavery and segregation. This relation and the terms in which it is articulated must consequently be analyzed in their cultural and historical context, even as one traces their connections to parallel formations elsewhere. Both political activism and cultural interpretation are concrete practices that depend upon the analysis of specific discourses and relations of power. In order to comprehend the ways in which Trump’s election has been understood and its relation to other events, from the Brexit vote to the rise in support for movements such as the Front National and Alternative für Deutschland, it is first necessary to be aware of its historical foundations. Despite its limitations, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America makes a valuable contribution to this process, offering a long perspective on dominant representations of the white working class in the United States and the uses to which these have been put. One uncomfortable conclusion is that the current political situation has significantly deeper roots than many would like to think and that its analysis has been constrained and distorted by inherited prejudices. As long as Trump’s opponents persist in seeing him simply as a historical anomaly, the product and embodiment of poor, racist whites, little meaningful change is possible. The concept of ‘white trash’ operates in contradictory ways, exposing tensions in the relation between race and power in the United States. On the one hand, it destabilizes racial hierarchies by drawing attention to people whose perceived economic and moral failings undermine the notion of inherent white superiority; on the other, it seeks to shore up such structural injustice by separating poor whites from their neighbours and fellow citizens. Those labelled as ‘white trash’ both are and are not recognized as white; as Isenberg notes, mid-nineteenth-century commentators even questioned their colour, describing ‘unnatural complexions’ of a ‘ghastly yellow white’, and skin like ‘yellow parchment’.16 Their racial identity is both abstract and precarious; they lack not only the material resources associated with whiteness but security in their categorization. The risk of redefinition has historically even characterized some who occupied positions of relative power. As Isenberg observes, Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel, who died before his inauguration, was labelled a ‘dirty black wench’ due to her ‘questionable backwoods upbringing’. (p. 127) Whiteness was a signifier of privilege rather than a simple matter of appearance, an evaluative rather than descriptive category, and it could not easily be acquired even with wealth and position. Race functions partly through a fiction of certainty, dividing the world into seemingly fixed, essential categories, but as this example indicates it is always more slippery and closely related to power than it claims. The idea that some poor white voters backed Trump in an effort to secure their racial status implicitly recognizes this, though few commentators have analyzed its implications. The remarkable success of Isenberg’s book is to a considerable degree a result of the presidential election and its aftermath. Widely read and reviewed, the text not only responds to current cultural anxieties but embodies some of the most important problems in the way many people still think about class and race in the United States. One of its major limitations is visible in its title. Whilst White Trash emphasizes its focus on the kinds of people who have been condemned over the years as ‘Crackers’, ‘Rednecks’, and ‘Trailer trash’ (p. 320), the subtitle suggests that this constitutes an analysis of class as such in America. This would only be true if ‘working class’ were a racialized category, a way of describing the poverty of white people. Isenberg does not ignore the oppression of African-Americans and other ethnic minorities but does not analyze it in terms of class. There have historically been good political reasons for analyzing race separately from class, not least that it prevents it from being seen as a secondary category, but in this instance it prevents the development of a broader understanding of oppression that recognizes the shared histories and interests of those exploited by capital. The working class has never been exclusively white, least of all in America. Decades after the pioneering work of critics such as bell hooks insisted on the need for intersectional analysis of inequality and injustice, the suggestion that white people are oppressed by class and non-white people are oppressed by racism is disappointing, not least because it reproduces the assumptions that continue to define mainstream American politics. The idea that the history and interests of the white working class are distinct from those of African-Americans is one Trump’s campaign embraced, encouraging poor white workers, despite the available evidence, to see themselves as marginalized by a liberal establishment that favoured ethnic minorities. Considered as an account of poor whites in United States and dominant attitudes towards them, White Trash is a useful, readable contribution to current debates. As numerous readers and reviewers have pointed out, the history it recounts is hardly ‘untold’ (a word that suggests the intervention of Viking’s marketing department), but Isenberg’s accessible, engaging narrative has already brought it to a wider audience than the vast majority of academic texts and its range is impressive. Predictably, given her expertise on Antebellum America, the earlier part of the book is the most successful: her analysis of the twentieth century contains valuable insights, not least on housing and the representation of trailer parks, but it is more disjointed than the sections on colonial and nineteenth-century America. There is nonetheless a consistent focus on the neglect of class in both popular and political discourse in the United States and an attempt to consider what the history of the country might look like if it included the experience of the white workers exploited and denigrated by those whose stories have come to represent America as a whole. The result is often iconoclastic and emphasizes the continued importance of myths of origin to the ongoing process of nation building. There is always a lot at stake in the stories countries tell about themselves, but this is particularly true at the moment in the United States, an enormous, diverse, immigrant nation whose president convinced a significant minority of voters that it needs to recover a lost greatness and coherence. How Isenberg represents foundational narratives matters and she shows an admirable willingness to question some of the most cherished. She is hardly the first to recognize the problems presented by Thanksgiving, which did not become a national holiday until the Civil War and was ‘associated with the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry’ (p. 7), but it is helpful to be reminded that the celebration forms part of an argument over American identity rather than a commemoration of an agreed, unified history. Amongst other things, the story of Thanksgiving helps to locate the legitimate history of the United States in the North-east rather than the South, obscuring the violence, exploitation and social divisions that visibly characterized the latter. Disputes about the beginnings, direction and character of America are always in part regional conflicts, and the repressed South returns repeatedly in White Trash, disrupting stories of a classless land of opportunity. The story of Plymouth Rock is central to one of the most important narratives Isenberg confronts. Public discourse in the United States emphasizes the country’s origins as a haven for the oppressed and rebellious, immigrants whose desire for freedom and opportunity encouraged their flight from hierarchical, repressive societies such as Britain. This idea is all the more important in a period of border walls, travel bans and deportations, but it only accounts for the experience of some people and places; amongst those whose histories are lost are the indentured servants and labourers imported to work in the fields and households of Virginia and South Carolina. The colonists who landed in America brought the values and assumptions of their home country with them, and these continued to shape attitudes to the poor, many of whom had few legal rights. Indentured workers were ruthlessly exploited by a small ruling class, and their contracts provided little protection; their indentures could be sold or transferred and their terms extended. Not all workers had even notionally chosen to be there. A continual shortage of labour ‘led some ship captains and agents to round up children from the streets of London and other towns to sell to planters’, a practice ‘known as ‘spiriting’ (p. 13). The rich landowners and companies who controlled the early settlements saw their workers as an expendable resource that could be used to ‘manure’ (p. 3) the new country, rather than as fellow citizens, while many in England viewed America as a place to dispose of surplus population, an economic liability that could be made into an asset in the colonies. America was not just a refuge for those seeking liberty of conscience but a place where an emergent capitalism could develop, less restricted by the ‘motley bonds of feudalism’17 that continued to limit economic development in Europe. Focusing attention on exploited white workers in the early colonies rather than pilgrims, explorers or idealists, reminds readers that American society has always been structured by class divisions, despite the vigorous, persistent claims to the contrary. Social hierarchies in the United States were informed by British values and institutions but did not simply reproduce them: Americans reinterpreted class structures and the narratives used to justify them under new material and intellectual conditions. Isenberg argues that the agricultural foundations of the country led many in its dominant classes to rationalize inequality in terms of stock and bloodlines. For wealthy landowners, poor whites had to be categorized as biologically distinct, a separate and inferior breed. Well into the twentieth century, scientific theories were used to legitimize this claim. Eugenics was hardly peculiar to the United States and did not find its fullest expression there but it had plenty of American supporters, including Theodore Roosevelt, who ‘used the bully pulpit of his office to insist that women had a critical civic duty to breed a generation of healthy and disciplined children’ (p. 192). By 1931, twenty-seven states had passed sterilization laws. Many attempts to police reproduction were aimed at ethnic minorities, such as the 1924 Racial Integrity Act in Virginia, which prohibited interracial marriage, but some targeted poor whites, who were also regarded as biologically inferior and potentially contaminating. As Isenberg notes, not only did a fear of promiscuity lead ‘eugenics reformers to push for the construction of additional asylums to house feebleminded white women’ but their arguments ‘deployed the term “segregation”’ (p. 197). White Trash might not pay sufficient attention to the diversity of the American working class but it is informative about the ways in which racial narratives have been used to represent poverty, including white poverty, as a state produced by the inherent failings of the poor. This idea rejects in advance any method of ameliorating poverty save limiting or eradicating the impoverished. Although poor whites were consistently represented as naturally inferior to their social superiors, they were also seen as threatening, not just to individuals but to the economic and legal order. Resistant to the logic of capitalism and dominant European values they settled in places like North Carolina, which Isenberg describes as ‘the first white trash colony’ (p. 47, her italics). In 1737, the state’s own governor, Gabriel Johnson, ‘referred to his people as “the meanest, most rustic and squalid part of the species”’ (p. 55), a view echoed by writers such as Charles Woodmason, who spent six years travelling in the Carolinas in the 1760s and produced a ‘damning portrait of the lazy, licentious, drunken, and whoring men and women’ (p. 110) he met. The idle and intoxicated were notionally Americans, though, and the extension of voting rights meant that their (male) descendants became participants in the political process rather than just threatening figures at its margins, a fact that provoked considerable anxiety amongst the ruling classes. And still does. The fear of ‘white trash’ voters rarely attributed independent ideas to them but focused on their numbers and susceptibility to manipulation. Isenberg describes a variety of politicians who have attempted to exploit the perceived prejudices of poor whites, particularly in the South, including Richard Nixon, whose Southern Strategy continues to shape Republican politics. The figure most relevant to current political struggles might be Andrew Jackson, whose portrait now hangs in the Oval office. Trump is an admirer of Jackson, and it is difficult to believe that Isenberg did not have the forty-fifth president in mind when she described the seventh as a man with a ‘fiery temper and lack of scholarly deportment’ who was ‘blunt in his opinions and quick to resent any who disagreed with him’ (p. 120), and whose actions were characterized by a ‘lack of regard for international law or constitutional details’ (p. 122). The parallel is useful primarily because it provides a historical context for the rhetorical and campaign strategies of the current administration. Trump is not an anomaly but locates himself within a long political tradition defined by, amongst other things, anti-intellectualism, a declared distrust of Washington ‘elites’, and a willingness to exploit social divisions, not least by appealing to racist fears. These are all qualities that can be displaced onto the poor white voters whose aspirations and will Trump claims to embody. His populism is less an explanation of his power than a way of legitimizing it, of laying claim to the broad mandate he, unlike Jackson, failed to win at the polls. As Isenberg argues, the neglect of class in the United States is not arbitrary but the result of a foundational national myth. The country still defines itself partly as a place that rejected the rigid hierarchies of Europe in favour of meritocracy, despite clear evidence to the contrary, including its low levels of economic mobility.18White Trash makes a valuable contribution to the necessary work of recognizing that ‘[c]lass separation is and has always been at the center of our political debates, despite every attempt to hide social reality with deceptive rhetoric’ (p. 320), and that America has always been a divided, unequal society. But the book has significant flaws. It is not only limited partly by its aforementioned failure to decide whether it is a history of impoverished whites or of the poor as such but by the surprising absence of voices from the farms and factories. The lack is particularly obvious if one contrasts White Trash with another recent accessible history of the working class, Selina Todd’s The People, which centres on the compelling, often surprising stories of people trying to make sense of their own experiences and decisions. Stereotypes of working-class whites persist in the United States partly because journalists and authors rarely bother talking to them. For conservatives and liberals alike, ideas of ‘white trash’ America often provide a starting point for attempts to understand political events, a problem that has been all too apparent in the responses to Trump’s election. The idea that he embodies the desires of white working-class voters, who are consequently responsible for his actions and attitudes, is one Trump endorses in his claim to represent the ‘forgotten men and women of our country’.19 It is not true. The narrative persists because it salves the consciences of the middle and upper classes and prevents effective analysis of the current administration. In order to counter it, we need the voices of those silenced by the term ‘white trash’; they cannot just be represented, they must be heard. Isenberg’s book matters because it exposes widespread stereotypes and prejudices that prevent us from understanding what has happened and why. Ben Clarke ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of Post-1900 British Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Orwell in Context (Palgrave, 2007), and co-author, with Michael Bailey and John K. Walton, of Understanding Richard Hoggart (Blackwell, 2011). He has published on authors including Jack Hilton, H. G. Wells, and Edward Upward, and subjects including public houses, Englishness, mining communities, and Western representations of Taiwan. He is currently co-editing Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice with Nick Hubble, which will be published by Palgrave in 2018. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, ‘Donald Trump is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment’, New York Times, 9 Nov. 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-president.html?_r=1. 2 Zoe Williams, ‘Think the north and the poor caused Brexit? Think again’, Guardian, 7 Aug. 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/07/north-poor-brexit-myths. 3 Jim Tankersley, ‘How Trump won: The revenge of working-class whites’, Washington Post, 9 Nov. 2016: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/09/how-trump-won-the-revenge-of-working-class-whites/?utm_term=.c5deb494aff8. 4 Ruth Sherlock, David Lawler, and Nick Allen, ‘Donald Trump calls on white working class to hand him a US-style Brexit’, Telegraph, 8 Nov. 2016: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/08/donald-trump-calls-on-white-working-class-to-hand-him-a-us-style/. 5 Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, ‘It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class’, Washington Post, 5 June 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?utm_term=.b698441ce5ba. 6 Charlie Post, ‘How the Donald came to rule’, Jacobin 24, winter 2017, pp. 41–8, p. 46. 7 Gregory Krieg, ‘It’s Official: Clinton swamps Trump in popular vote’, CNN Politics, 22 Dec. 2016: http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-popular-vote-final-count/index.html. 8 Christopher Ingraham, ‘The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s’, Washington Post: 31 March 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-surprisingly-small-industries-that-employ-more-people-than-coal/. 9 Post, ‘How the Donald came to rule’, p. 42. 10 Williams, ‘Think the north and the poor caused Brexit?’. 11 Post, ‘How the Donald came to rule’, p. 42. 12 Kevin D. Williamson, ‘Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: the White Working Class’s Dysfunction’, National Review, 28 March 2016: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump. 13 Owen Jones, Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class (2011), London, 2012, p. 9. 14 David Nichols, The Bogan Delusion: Myths, Mischief and Misconceptions, Melbourne, 2011, p. 56. 15 Nichols, Bogan Delusion, p. 60. 16 Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, New York, 2016, p. 151. All subsequent references to the book are given in the text. 17 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 1–30, p. 3. 18 See, for example, Larry Elliott, ‘OECD: UK has worse social mobility record than other developed countries’, Guardian, 10 March 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility. Britain and Italy are the only two European countries that have lower levels of intergenerational mobility than the United States. 19 David Jackson and Doug Stanglin, ‘Trump is now president: “The forgotten … will be forgotten no longer”’, USA Today 20 Jan. 2017: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/20/donald-trump-inauguration-day-president-white-house/96782700/. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Healey, Jonathan

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbx051pmid: N/A

Abstract On 14 September 1534, two men fought on a meadow outside the town of Weymouth, Dorset, watched by a crowd of their neighbours. Learning of the fight, one of the town constables charged between the men, and killed one of them, leading to his prosecution and subsequent appeal to the court of Star Chamber. The investigation by that court left several thousand words of testimony, making it one of the best documented fights in the sixteenth century. This article offers a microhistory of the fight. In particular, it asks what such an event can tell us about the nature of government in the early Tudor period. It suggests that at this time such flashpoints were crucial moments where the state was expected to play a dramatic role. But this in turn depended on participants performing their role as state actors. That could be very dangerous, but detailed reconstructions can also show how state actors, though lacking the visual symbolic apparatus we expect of the modern state, might deploy oral performances to signify their official role. How was Tudor England governed? It is a deceptive question. One way of answering it, of course, would be to look at queens, kings, ministers, parliamentarians, courtiers, lord chancellors, keepers of the great seal, cardinals and vicegerents: the big names; the powerful men and women. But, when we consider that this was a state without a standing army, a bureaucracy, or a police force, the question of how becomes all the more fascinating and impenetrable. How was Tudor England governed? When the ‘state’ had so little formal power, how did it attempt to control violence and crime, police morals and faith, and collect tax? The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been identified as a period of ‘state formation’, in which there was a major growth in the competencies of government, widely defined.1 But how did this happen? To answer this question, we need to think about how government – which I’m defining here as the formal control of people’s actions by that collection of officials, institutions, and ideas that we normally call the state – reached from Westminster down into England’s parishes. Historians of the late medieval and early modern state have used central archives, family papers, and the records of local courts and parishes to consider the relationship between Westminster and the localities and to gauge the power of English government. They have done much to illuminate the ‘organisation, institutionalisation, representation and expression of political power’ on which the early modern state depended.2 This article takes a different approach. It is not a study of slow, structural change, or of gradual administrative development. Instead, it is a micro-study of government. It looks closely at a ‘moment of government’ for which we have very detailed records, to tease out from the event some wider insights into the nature of the early modern state. Doing so, it suggests that government was not just something that was, it was something that happened. There were moments, flashpoints, such as instances of disorder, where government was supposed to intervene. It was supposed to be an actor in these momentary dramas. Indeed, it is in the frequent involvement of the ‘state’ in such moments that there lies a key element of the routinization of the ‘state idea’. In order for the idea that there was an overarching body of authority to exist, people had to see it in action. Moreover, in the Tudor context, the engagement of the state in such dramatic moments depended on the actions of those people charged with carrying out the will of the state, notably officeholders. In the Tudor period, these officeholders were amateurs, and usually quite ordinary people. Thus, by extension, in the key flashpoints at which the state was supposed to show its power, its ability to do so depended on the tradesmen, yeoman, husbandmen and shopkeepers who acted in its name. The ways they did so, I would like to suggest, involved them performing a role: that of a state actor. Thus, in order to gain a better sense of how the Tudor state worked, we need to look in close detail at how people acted in its name. To do so means looking closely at what we might term ‘state dramas’ or ‘moments of government’: arrests, public announcements, the serving of writs, and suchlike. This means turning to the techniques of micro-history. Micro-history is now a well-established tool of the discipline.3 It involves, broadly speaking, the close analysis of small things, such as individual places or events, such that the detail of the past emerges. It has, though, only rarely been applied to the history of the Tudor state. This article focuses on one location, but it is not a local history as such. Rather, it is a history of a specific incident – an obscure though very violent one – that took place on a festival day in the small Dorset town of Weymouth in 1534, and ended with a dead body lying on a meadow. For once, we have enough sources, specifically witness testimony, to reconstruct in some detail what happened that day.4 The reason we know so much about the incident in question is that it attracted the attention of the Court of Star Chamber. Initially a judicial arm of the King’s Council, dedicated to cases of disorder and to punishing local officeholders who abused their power, Star Chamber had developed under Cardinal Wolsey into a major law court.5 Its power derived from the royal prerogative rather than the common law, and this meant that it followed the principles of ‘equity’: its judgements were based on an abstract sense of justice even when this contradicted the rigours of the common law. It used Roman civil‐law procedure, which meant that evidence was collected from witnesses in written form. The basic procedure involved plaintiffs lodging a ‘Bill of Complaint’, in English, with the court. Defendants would then respond with an ‘Answer’. These might then be followed with a ‘Replication’ and a ‘Rejoinder’, restating both sides of the case. Following this, if the case went to the trial stage, evidence would be collected: witnesses would usually be given a list of questions, known as ‘interrogatories’, and their sworn answers – ‘depositions’ – would then be collected and presented at trial. After trial, if the defendant was found guilty, they could be handed any punishment short of death; usually this meant a large fine. Before the 1550s, only a relatively small number of sets of interrogatories and depositions survive. This is a shame, because these offer some of the most vivid evidence we have for the period, and they offer evidence rooted in actual testimony rather than the often florid legalese of the formal pleadings. There is, though, a large collection of depositions, amounting to over 4,000 words of text, relating to a lethal affray on a meadow outside Weymouth, Dorset, on the feast day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September) 1534. The documents provide what must be one of the most detailed sets of evidence about a single altercation in the whole early Tudor period. Naturally, they need treating with care. In particular, we need to heed the fact that our witnesses were attempting to construct particular narratives with their testimonies. They took sides. They only partially recalled events – perhaps deliberately, perhaps because memories were unclear. The witnesses have left us with a courtroom ‘truth’, which will be a partial, distorted view of events as they happened. The kind of micro-historical study attempted here, which looks to see deep into an individual event and analyse its meaning, depends on the historian’s judgement to reconstruct a plausible narrative. In what follows, I have tried to do this as much as the sources allow, and to highlight particular areas of ambiguity, but there will always be a degree of uncertainty to this sort of thing. The town of Weymouth itself was one of two tiny boroughs, facing one another across the River Wey and joined by a rope ferry. (Figs 1 and 2) Together they looked out east from a bay bounded by a peninsula to the west and Chesil Beach and Isle of Portland to the west and south. The neighbouring borough, Melcombe Regis, had been a staple port for wool in the fourteenth century, and was supposedly where the Black Death first entered England in 1348. Weymouth itself benefited from the lucrative import of Gascon wine around the same time. The fifteenth century appears to have seen decay; the area was undoubtedly affected by plague and raids by the French, with Melcombe apparently the softer of the two targets. The wine trade declined too, thanks to the war, while Melcombe lost its position as a customs port to Poole in 1433.6 Nonetheless, the towns retained some local importance into the sixteenth century, not least for military reasons: a castle was built at Sandsfoot in Henry VIII’s reign, completed in 1542. A number of ‘Normans’ are recorded amongst the population in the early sixteenth century, suggesting continued cross-Channel enterprise. By mid century John Leland thought Melcombe had shrunk: ‘as yt is evidently seene, [it] hath beene far bigger than yt is now’, putting this down to ‘the French-men that yn tymes of warre raid this towne for lak of defence’.7 Both towns returned members of parliament until the two seats were merged in 1571; Melcombe had a mayor. But the two remained very small. The Lay Subsidy of 1525 gives a total of forty taxpayers in Weymouth and twenty-five in Melcombe, which (assuming it refers to adults over sixteen) would equate to roughly 180 and 115 inhabitants respectively.8 Muster Rolls survive for 1539 and 1542, and these suggest slightly higher population totals, with sixty-four listed for Weymouth and forty-five for Melcombe, which might equate to roughly 225 and 160 respectively (based on a multiplier of 3.5). If these estimates are correct, then we are looking at a small community of around 300–350 inhabitants in 1525 in the two boroughs, perhaps growing to 375–400 in about 1540. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Detail of Map of the Isle of Portland and Weymouth, by Robert Adams (1590). Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Detail of Map of the Isle of Portland and Weymouth, by Robert Adams (1590). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Map of the Isle of Portland and Weymouth, by Robert Adams (1590). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Map of the Isle of Portland and Weymouth, by Robert Adams (1590). ‘THIS BUSYNESSE’ Our story begins the night before the fray, a Sunday evening. Two men, William Browne and Richard Francis, set upon two others, William Apere and Rowland Frenchman. In the scuffle, Richard Francis struck Rowland Frenchman a blow with his fist. The second pair, Apere and Frenchman, were servants of one William Hawkins, who was one of the constables of Weymouth, and he was soon on the scene. Presumably he and his men had been about some business that evening. Hawkins, according to a later witness, came at William Browne ‘with gret fury’, and ‘sett hand apon hym and toke his sword from hym’.9 At this point, Hawkins’s men were joined by two others, Richard Reynold and Alice his wife, and the four of them – presumably at Hawkins’s order – charged at the original two assailants. They grabbed William Browne by the hair and pulled him to the ground, whereupon Richard Reynold ‘toke a gret stone, And with the same brake the hed of the said Willyam Browne and lefft hym there for ded’. At this point, William Randall, who would become the central character to the whole drama, entered the scene. Randall was a Weymouth merchant, probably quite prosperous (he also brewed ale or – more likely – beer); and he, like William Hawkins, was one of the town’s constables. Somehow he got wind of the violence unfolding: ‘herynge of this busynesse’, he came to Hawkins and – as a fellow constable – admonished him for his part in the violence. ‘[M]ethyncketh’, he is quoted as saying, ‘you have not done well to entrete the said Browne after this maner, for seynge you be the kynges officer if he had done otherwise than he shuld have done you shuld have sett hym in the stockes and not have usyd hym affter this fasshion’. Violence had erupted; one constable, whose servants were being attacked, had responded by unleashing more violence; another had admonished him for this. William Browne had been relieved of his sword, attacked with a stone, and apparently left for dead on the ground. There things lay, it seems, until the next day. The following day was a festival day, of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September). It was evidently a time of celebration and drinking. People came to Weymouth from across the surrounding area and beyond. It may also have had some significance as the date where drinking establishments were expected to shorten their opening hours in response to the encroachment of winter.10 Perhaps, then, to some it signified the end of the summer. By two o’clock in the afternoon, though, a serious altercation was brewing. William Browne, now recovered from the attack, but still without his confiscated sword, was down by the quay at his own landing. Here he saw Richard Reynold, one of his attackers, and Reynold was wearing the sword. Incensed, Browne challenged his enemy. According to an unnamed witness, Browne demanded of Reynold ‘whye he wore that sworde’, to which Reynold answered ‘for suche a knave as thow arte’.11 It was a direct insult, not least because it used the dismissive ‘thow’, and it was too much for Browne, who issued a threat: ‘I will mete the[e] a nother tyme well ynough’. ‘[N]o better tyme than now’, answered Reynold. Then ‘go in to the medow and I will dele halfe halfe a dosen strypys with the[e]’, retorted Browne. ‘[T]here shall thow mete me’, said Reynold. Violence the previous night, the insult of wearing another man’s sword, the repeated use of the degrading ‘thow’ and ‘thee’, and the verbal challenge: these had escalated quickly into an organized fight. Reynold, our unnamed witness recalled, then went straight to the meadow, and ‘taryed there floryshynge with his sword halfe an owre’. Browne went back home to pick up a buckler (a small shield). On his way home, Browne was waylaid by Alice Reynold, Richard’s wife, who herself had been part of the gang of four who had attacked him and left him for dead the previous night. You should ‘tary at home’, she said, ‘and kepe your boys hed hole’. At this point, our unnamed witness slipped off, went over to constable William Randall’s house, and – it seems – warned him of what was about to go down. William Browne, undeterred by Alice Reynold’s taunt to protect his ‘boy’s head’, went on to the meadow, known as Hope Mead – almost certainly the area just south of the waterfront near what is now Hope Square.12 All the while, others were gathering on the meadow. Alice Reynold arrived, clutching stones; William Apere too (also from the night before), brandishing a cowl-staff; Joan Apere, William’s wife; and the ‘wiffe of one John of Smalmouth’. While all this was happening, constable William Randall was sat drinking in the house of Richard Harvest, fifty years old, a yeoman, and one of the bailiffs of the town. With Randall drinking were Harvest, at least one of Harvest’s servants, and several others ‘in company’.13 At some point, they heard what one witness described as ‘noyse of a fray’: noise, or perhaps more properly news of the fray started to filter in.14 According to Richard Harvest, bailiff and owner of the house, Randall’s daughter Elizabeth came to him, ‘and spake sofftely in the ere of hir father’.15 At this point, Randall rose (‘incontynently’ according to the bailiff; ‘with a gret furie and in haste’ according to another witness),16 and he left the house. As he stormed off, Elizabeth implored Richard Harvest the bailiff to try and stall her father; as Harvest later testified, she told that ‘her mother prayd hym to helpe kepe her father at home’, and that he should not come to the fray. Sensing the danger Randall was about to put himself into, Harvest the bailiff and one of his servants (a twenty-year-old called Henry Harvest, so perhaps a relative) ran after him. The chronology here is not quite clear, but it seems Randall got home, ran into his brewhouse, and picked up a cowl-staff – a long stave used for carrying a ‘cowl’, or basket. At some point, the wife of William Browne, one of the assailants, ‘cryed out upon hym and said that Richard Reynold and her husbande were gone in to the medow by apoyntment to fyght’.17 But if the evidently frightened wife of William Browne was trying to persuade him to get involved, Randall’s own wife was understandably trying to keep him out of danger. She ‘and dyvers other wolde have stoppyd the same Rendall’, but he said ‘by his faith he entendyd nothyng but to kepe the peace by cause he was constable’.18 According one witness he retorted ‘know you not that I am constable, And therefore lette me go for I wyll see the kynges peace kept’.19 Shortly afterwards, as he approached the meadow itself, he then met with Richard and Henry Harvest. Richard recalled that he ‘cryed apon hym that he shulde beware whate he dyd’;20 Henry Harvest ‘requyryd the said Rendall in the fylde joynynge to the medow where the fray was to forbere and not to come there’.21 But constable Randall was adamant: ‘by his faith and troth he wold do nothynge but kepe the kynges peace’, he said to Henry Harvest.22 To Richard Harvest, he ‘tarryed aboute saying you know that I am constable, And swore a gret othe that he wolde do nothynge but kepe the kinges peace’.23 THE FRAY While this drama was unfolding, William Browne and Richard Reynold were already on Hope Meadow, ‘fyghtynge together with there swordis’.24 They had also attracted a crowd. Alice Reynold was there, as was the wife of one John of Smallmouth. According to the later Bill of Complaint, also present were William Apere, yeoman (in the depositions he is described as a weaver), Joan Apere his wife, and Agnes Apere, as well as divers others to the number of seven. We can also safely say that at least twelve of the deponents (including one, William Apere, who was named in the Bill) were there. Another Joan Apere, mother to William, is also reported as having been present, as – again – was Rowland Frenchman. One deponent, John Marcombe, a Norman-born servant to bailiff Richard Harvest, said that on hearing of the fray, he had run to the meadow ‘to se whate shuld be done’; another – Thomas Birt, also a servant to the bailiff – said that he, ‘with all spede he cowde ran to the medow to see it’.25 The fray had become a public affair, watched by neighbours, relatives and townspeople alike. Many of the observers were not neutral ones. According to one witness (a tailor from the town), Alice Reynold, the three Aperes, the wife of John of Smallmouth and Rowland Frenchman all ‘assawtyd and threw stonys with all there power at the said Willyam Browne’, indeed Alice Reynold ‘strake the said Browne with a stone in the face and therewith strake iiii or v tethe oute of his hed’.26 Another witness recalled a stone hitting Browne on the arm, breaking it.27 It was at this point that William Randall charged in. Brandishing his cowl-staff, he rushed between the two fighting men, ‘cryinge as lowde as he cowde kepe the kynges peace’.28 As he did so, Alice Reynold ‘cryed to her husband take hede to Rendall’.29 The onlookers’ stones rained down on him. One was ‘horeld’ (hurled) by Alice Reynold and hit the left side of his back, another by the mysterious wife of John of Smallmouth, hitting him on the leg. Despite this, Randall was able – it seems – to use his staff to separate the fighting men. At this point, the testimony of witnesses diverges somewhat. According to some, Richard Reynold aimed a ‘hawke stroke’ (a hook stroke) at constable Randall.30 Raising his cowl-staff, Randall parried; then, pushing pack Reynold’s double-edged sword, he forced it back into his assailant’s face. Reynold fell to the ground, a deep gash to his head. According to other witnesses, Randall was the aggressor, and Reynold parried a swipe with the staff, only to have his own sword driven back into his own head. All witnesses agreed, though, that Reynold immediately fell to the ground, dead. THE INQUEST Immediately, the surgeon was called. He was Thomas Spicer, of nearby Abbotsbury, twenty-seven years of age. He later testified that he was sent for to Abbotsbury (some miles away) ‘to come to the said Reynold to do his conynge’ (cunning, or knowledge).31 He arrived at about seven o’clock in the evening, and searched the body, finding a single sword cut, ‘of the length of ii ynches and more in depenes to the skulle’. At some point, although it is not clear when, a coroner’s inquest was held.32 A jury of twelve was empanelled by John Clerk the coroner, and they viewed the body. The majority verdict, it seems, was that Reynold had been killed by a single stroke, but there was evidently also some chicanery. One of the jurors was a John Gregory, who was the dead man’s brother-in-law – married to his sister. It is possible that this was the mysterious John of Smallmouth, whose wife had thrown stones at William Browne and constable Randall. He seems to have given a different opinion; and it seems that the minority view was taken by the coroner. One of the majority jurors, thirty-three-year-old mason John Kingdom, recalls being asked by Clerk to assent to a document (an ‘inquisition’), which he and another juror refused to do. Clerk, indeed, was not neutral, for he too was Reynold’s brother-in-law. Constable Randall was indicted. At this point, he appealed to Star Chamber, which launched an investigation. The writ for this survives, and is dated to 20 October 1534, just over a month afterwards.33 From the depositions we know that the investigation was presided over by three prominent local men: Edward Strangeways, Thomas Trenchard, knight, and Sir Thomas More of Melplash. We do not know the precise outcome of the Star Chamber suit, but Randall evidently survived the indictment: his son, also William, served as MP for the town in the 1550s, when he was known as ‘William Randall the younger’, which almost certainly meant his father was alive then or at least only recently deceased. More to the point, he was involved in a fracas a few years later while serving as bailiff, in another case that ended up in Star Chamber. He is very likely the William Randall listed in the militia muster rolls of 1539 and 1542.34 The Randalls would remain as a prominent Weymouth family to at least the end of the century.35 Most of the witnesses called upon to testify roughly backed up constable Randall’s story: he intervened in the fight because he was constable; he cried ‘keep the King’s peace’; and he pushed back Reynold’s stroke in self-defence. The only witness from the coroner’s jury agreed that the inquest had been cooked. The narrative allows Randall to claim both self-defence and what we would call a justifiable homicide: he had killed while acting in his role as a King’s officer. But there was some dissent. Some witnesses were cagey: fifty-year-old Thomas Grey of Wyke, husbandman, said he was not at the fray, but came there quickly afterwards, where he ‘herde the reporte that Willyam Rendall was he that hurte the said Reynold with a cowlestaffe’. John Hawkins of Weymouth, fifty-year-old husbandman, testified that Randall had struck at Reynold, ‘And the said Reynold caste up his sworde to defende the stroke, And not withstandynge the said Rendall with the same stroke drave his sworde to his hed, wherewith the said Reynold fell to the grounde’. Walter Blackstock, a sixty-year-old mariner agreed: he saw ‘the said Willyam Rendall come at the said Reynold, and to his sight put the same Reynold in the necke with his staffe, where with the said Reynold than fell to the grounde’. John Fowey of Cerne Abbas, a yeoman, thought too that Randall had been the aggressor, and that the injury had been inflicted with the cowl-staff and not Reynold’s sword. William Apere, revealed as a thirty-three-year-old weaver, unsurprisingly agreed, likewise contradicting the view of the surgeon. Such testimonies could be taken to imply Randall had malice aforethought. The most striking contrarian testimony was that of Thomas Birt, a twenty-year-old servant to Robert Samways, one of the town bailiffs.36 He was there, drinking with Richard Harvest (the other bailiff, you will recall), when news came through to constable Randall. He remembers Randall’s daughter coming to her father ‘and spake sofftely to her father in his ere at that tyme syttinge there’. He recalls that, on hearing ‘noyse and report of a fray to be in the medow betwyne the said Reynold and Browne’, he ‘with all spede he cowde ran to the medow to see it’. So quick was Birt that he overtook one of the participants, William Browne, in a lane adjoining a chapel – next to the meadow.37 Here, he says, he ‘he demaundyd the said Browne whither he was goynge’, to which Browne replied he ‘was goynge in to the medow to speke with a goode fellow’. Birt reports that he then ‘requyred’ Browne ‘to tary from thens’, but Browne refused. Birt would have stopped him, he said, but ‘the said Browne thereappon strake and foynyd38 at this deponent with his sworde’. Neither would Browne be stopped by Alice Reynold: as he came to the meadow, Alice ‘stoppyd before her husbande and desyryd the said Browne to forbere, which he wolde not’. ‘And than she said and if he wolde not she wolde throw a stone at hym whiche she had in her hande, And thereapon horeld a stone at the said Browne but strake hym not’. Browne then ran at Reynold, and the two men – according to Birt – aimed a couple of ineffectual strokes with their swords. At this point, Randall entered ‘withoute speaking any worde’, breaking one of Reynold’s strokes and pushing it back into his head, killing him. Birt adds one final detail: Alice Reynold, he says, ‘ran to her husband cryynge and wolde have taken up her said husbande’, but constable Randall ‘strake her apon the back with his said Cowle staffe, which done the said Rendall threw awey his said cowlestaffe and so went his wey thens’. Birt doesn’t necessarily imply malice aforethought, but he does claim that Randall hadn’t publicized his official capacity, and that he committed a needless assault on a grieving wife. THE NATURE OF VIOLENCE This was a shocking act of violence. A brawl the previous night had led to an arranged swordfight; a constable had intervened, apparently trying to ‘keep the King’s peace’, but in the melee had killed one of the participants. He was indicted, but appealed to the higher court of Star Chamber which – it would appear – protected him, or at least opened the way to a royal pardon which he may still have considered necessary. There are lots of ways we can interpret this. In some sense, the temptation is to see this as the actions of hotheaded people in a hotheaded age, when tempers were frail and lives were nasty, brutish and short. But this is not enough. For historians, this is a rare window into a dramatic moment, when some of the realities of Tudor life and in particular of the Tudor state were brought vividly into the light. Let us think more carefully about the fray on the meadow. We can observe, to start with, some of the character of a Tudor feast day. Witnesses gave their place of abode, so we can see that at least one had come from as far as Cerne Abbas, but most were from Weymouth and nearby Wyke. Also present, though, was one Henry Stycke of Molton, Devon, a clothmaker, who had been in Richard Harvest’s house drinking. We can see two of the town’s bailiffs, sitting and drinking together on a Monday afternoon, with their servants, friends, and perhaps business associates (this may explain the presence of the Molton clothmaker). They were drinking at the house of Richard Harvest, which may have been an inn or tavern, or (perhaps less likely) a mere alehouse. William Randall had a brewhouse too, so he may have been involved in the beer trade, burgeoning at that point. The other witnesses recorded more modest trades, but it is striking how many of them were husbandmen, small farmers, a testament to the close links between the small town and its local rural economy. Presumably the feast day brought custom from around the region. It is striking, too, that at least one of the witnesses was Norman-born; aliens were not uncommon in Dorset at the time, and provided one link between Dorset and the wider world.39 More interesting, though, is to think about what the fray tells us of the nature of violence in early Tudor society. The sheer viscerality of the case is quite striking. Browne was beaten up the night before, at which point Reynold ‘toke a gret stone, And with the same brake the hed of the said Willyam Browne and lefft hym there for ded’. The next day, Browne was battered by stones, apparently breaking his arm and striking out several of his teeth. Nonetheless, it should not be exaggerated into a stereotyped assumption that this was necessarily a brutal age. The fray was semi-organized: when they met on the quay in the early afternoon and exchanged words, they did not fight straightaway, they arranged to meet at a later time. The blood was not completely hot, even if it was probably still pretty warm. As Charles Phythian-Adams has pointed out, there were rituals of interpersonal violence in this period, people did not just go at it randomly with one another.40 And the fray does seem to have been way out of the ordinary. People heard ‘noise’ of it: it was news; they rushed to the meadow ‘to see it’. They remembered it vividly enough to give detailed testimony several weeks later. As much as this was a brutally violent occurrence, it was still something unusual enough to be worthy of attention and memory.41 The violence also, strikingly, fitted around some of the political patterns and networks of everyday life. Interestingly, there is absolutely no evidence of any religious conflict involved: literally no hint here that England was, at this point, going through a painful process of religious change which would shortly touch off a colossal rebellion in the north. Read carefully, however, and two separate factions appear. Richard Reynold, the dead man, had a considerable network of support, some of whom were his kin. John Clerk the coroner and John Gregory the juryman were both related to Reynold by marriage, and their support was instrumental in ensuring constable Randall’s prosecution. Reynold was also supported by the other of the town’s two constables, William Hawkins. In fact, it seems likely that Hawkins was part of a network of support and patronage of which Reynold was also a part. In the initial fight, the night before, it was William Apere and Rowland Frenchman – servants to William Hawkins – who set upon William Browne first. One of the witnesses to the fray, who placed the blame on constable Randall’s aggression, was John Hawkins, so probably a relative. Indeed, interestingly, it was Hawkins who was the first-named defendant in Randall’s Star Chamber suit. Of course, testimony from witnesses may have varied as a simple result of differing recollections. We cannot always read political machinations into the disagreements of witnesses. Nonetheless, there was clearly a group amongst the witnesses who were trying to create a narrative that incriminated Randall. The testimony of twenty-year-old Thomas Birt is particularly striking in its detailed, and carefully incriminating, recitation of evidence against constable Randall and William Browne. Birt had tried to stop Browne, but Browne had been spoiling for a fight; Randall had said nothing – he had not cried ‘Keep the King’s Peace’ – before charging into the fray; Reynold and Browne had only been trading ineffectual blows until that moment; Randall’s stroke against Reynold was not in self-defence; such, indeed, was his violent disposition that he even hit Reynold’s grieving wife, before running off – the action, surely, of a man with a guilty conscience. But what is perhaps most striking about Birt’s testimony is who he was, for he was a servant to one of the town bailiffs, Robert Samways. The Samways family were locally important, and Robert was almost certainly either one of the sons or grandsons of Geoffrey Samways, a Dorchester man who died in 1486. One of the family, Thomas Samways, would be bailiff, MP and mayor of Melcombe at various points in the 1540s and 1550s.42 In fact, Reynold had other important allies too. John Clerk was not just the coroner, but in 1529 he was elected one of the town’s MPs, although on arrival in London he rescinded the position to one William Bond, for reasons unknown.43 The dead man Reynold, then, had powerful associates. So, though, did his opponents. The implication of the case is that Browne and Randall knew each other; if Reynold had constable Hawkins as his ally, Browne appears to have had constable Randall. And Randall, it would appear, was linked to the other bailiff, Richard Harvest. He was in Harvest’s house drinking, and Harvest’s servants appeared as witnesses broadly in support for Browne. It is possible, then, that we are looking at two factions within the town, each centred on a linear axis between a bailiff, a constable, and one of the participants in the fray. These factions were fought out in the law, and they were fought out in the street. Insofar as the state was represented locally by the people who acted as its officers, it was split in two. But the chance survival of another lawsuit from five years later cautions us against reading too much into this. William Randall was involved again, this time as bailiff, as was Richard Harvest (as constable); but this time they were being sued by one George Whelplay, a professional informer, who was trying to gain the King’s bounty on some horses he had seized before they could be illegally exported. He claimed ill-treatment at the hands of the Weymouth authorities.44 The chief defendant this time was John Clerk, corrupt coroner, brother-in-law to Richard Reynold, and former foe of constable Randall. On this occasion, they were all on the same side. In fact, the case looks much like one in which the local community was closing ranks against an outsider. The violence also drew in family members, including women. Garthine Walker has argued that crime and violence were often family affairs in the early modern period, and this was certainly the case here.45 When Browne was initially assaulted, pulled by the hair and left for dead, among the attackers was the husband and wife team of Richard and Alice Reynold. Indeed, Alice was a constant presence throughout the affair, so much that she was named by constable Randall in his bill of complaint to Star Chamber. After her involvement in the initial altercation, we see her taunting Browne the following day, ‘Tarry at home, and keep your boy’s head whole’. Then we see her brandishing a stone at Browne at the meadow, telling him ‘to forbear’, and if he would not, ‘she would throw a stone at him’; and we see her throwing a stone at Browne, knocking out ‘four or five’ of his teeth. We see her warning her husband ‘Take heed to Randall!’ as he engaged him; and we see her hurling a stone at Randall, hitting him hard on the left breast. Finally we see her crying out as her husband fell to the ground, running at Randall, but being hit on her back with his staff. Several other women were mentioned in the bill, and witnesses testified to there being at least four women, including Alice Reynold, at the meadow. They were hardly neutral spectators. They were clearly on the side of Reynold; it was not incompatible with Reynold’s masculine honour to have his cause supported by a group of women armed with stones. In fact, the role of women in the fight is doubly interesting if we note the stereotype, common at the time, that it was men who fought with weapons; women, so the commonplace went, fought with their tongues.46 In our fray in Weymouth, however, it was predominantly the men who were unruly of their tongues, insulting and challenging each other. And the women used weapons: stones. Words, deeds, and weapons were all tied into the social hierarchies of the day, too. When Alice Reynold taunted William Browne, telling him to keep his ‘boy’s head whole’, she was insulting his position as a patriarch, denying him his manhood. In the normal scheme of things, an adult male was superior to an adult female; a ‘boy’, though, was subordinate to both. Another ‘un-manning’ insult came when Richard Reynold took William Browne’s sword. In fact, the trigger to the fray was not just Reynold’s taking of Browne’s sword, but his wearing of it. The symbolism of wearing a sword was not just about the power to inflict violence; it was also about masculinity, and perhaps most importantly of all, it was about social standing. Wearing a sword was traditionally one of the trappings of a gentleman. We do not know the status of the two men, though the fact one witness talked about Browne being ‘at his landing’ when he spied Reynold wearing the sword suggests he was wealthy enough to own or rent a quayside landing. In the bill of complaint, he is described as a tailor, though in the right circumstances this could mean he was quite wealthy. But social status was about more than money, and the honour that sword-bearing conferred was significant. By taking it from Browne, and by wearing it (and indeed by calling him a ‘knave’), Reynold was deliberately upending Browne’s position in the social hierarchy. Add to this the regular and well-attested use of the derogatory ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ rather than ‘you’, by all sides, and we have an altercation in which insults to personal honour were central. Looking carefully at the weapons being used, we can even detect a hint of hierarchy there too. Browne and Reynold fought with swords and a buckler, William Apere and William Randall brandished cowl-staffs, and the women fought with stones. We should be careful with this, as the evidence suggests Randall was Browne and Reynold’s social equal: they were all members of the urban elite (and Apere may have been also). Indeed, it shows that swordfighting was not always the sole preserve of the nobility or gentry. Stones, on the other hand, have been identified as a specifically female weapon, and there are plenty of examples of women using stones for acts of violence, so much so that John Walter considers stoning ‘a form of violence particularly associated with women’.47 Whether this was true: whether stones were a specifically gendered projectile, or whether they were simply the easiest things to hand for those who traditionally went about unarmed, will have to await further investigation. But the evidence here certainly fits the established pattern. In a sense, though, the most interesting weapons here were actually the cowl-staffs. This was a staff with a hook on the end, used for carrying a basket. It was a work tool, albeit one that could be used offensively. Now, we are told that early modern people (‘everyone, however poor’, according to Lawrence Stone) routinely carried knives, partly for the purpose of eating.48 Yet knives appear rarely in Star Chamber cases from the sixteenth century. In fact, people seem to have been surprisingly careful about how they deployed violence. Fists, staves, and even the flats of swords were used, sharp implements tended not to be.49 A MOMENT OF GOVERNMENT Perhaps most important of all, though, is the fact that the constable – with all the risks of his role – does not appear to have carried a weapon. He had to run home to get one, and when he did, he picked up a work tool. Randall was central to the drama, and his role can, I think, tell us much about ‘the state’ in the early sixteenth century. This was a state that did not have a standing army, or a police force, or much of a professional bureaucracy. It lacked much of the infrastructure and symbolism of modern states: it had few uniforms (some of its agents, of course, wore the royal livery); there were no police stations. Where what we might call ‘authoritative buildings’ did exist, they usually represented complicated, layered power: the parish church represented royal authority, but it also represented Christendom, and it was a focus for local identity. Town guildhalls represented the authority of the Crown and at the same time were a political expression of urban self-rule. The most notable exceptions were county gaols, royal castles, and shire-houses. These were more obvious manifestations in bricks and mortar of the authority of state, but – of course – still lay relatively distant from parochial life.50 Unpaid officers, then, remained crucial. As historians such as Mark Goldie and Steve Hindle have emphasized, officeholders were the men and (more rarely) women upon whom the whole edifice of state formation depended.51 Without their co-operation, statutes were hard to enforce, taxes hard to collect, criminals impossible to apprehend. They were the ones who had to act the role of the state in dramatic moments like our fray on the meadow. They were people like William Randall. And so, one of the things that makes the Weymouth case so fascinating is that we are able – thanks to the level of surviving detail – to get some sense of how the state worked at the lowest levels. Let us finish by thinking about this. * * * Perhaps the most obvious point to make is that this shows how doing the state’s bidding could be dangerous. As constable, William Randall ran the risk of severe physical harm when he tried to break up a fight between two men armed with swords. Moreover, in the line of duty he fatally injured someone, and thus ran the risk of malicious prosecution for his actions. Given the tense situations that constables were expected to involve themselves in, which included breaking up fights, arresting violent criminals, collecting tax, distraining peoples’ goods, even – in at least one case – enforcing shotgun weddings, they (and similar officers like tithingmen) were in an especially dangerous position.52 Given this, it is striking that Randall expressed a sense of duty when breaking up the fray. ‘[K]now you not that I am constable, And therefore lette me go for I wyll see the kynges peace kept’, he is supposed to have said; one witness recalled that he ‘swore a gret othe that he wolde do nothynge but kepe the kinges peace’. He also apparently had views about the proper conduct of constables, as when the night before he admonished his fellow officer, [M]ethyncketh you have not done well to entrete the said Browne after this maner, for seynge you be the kynges officer if he had done otherwise than he shuld have done you shuld have sett hym in the stockes and not have usyd hym affter this fasshion. Of course, there were courtroom narratives which aimed to emphasize Randall’s public role, but even if we don’t take them at face value (and there’s no necessary reason we shouldn’t), such statements suggest a sense of duty attached to the office. It also, presumably, gave the social cachet of working for the King. This was still a world where ‘service’ to a great master gave a powerful sense of status, and there could be no master greater than the King himself. Ultimately, though, this was an abstract ‘king’: being the ‘king’s officer’ effectively evoked the authority of what we would call the state. When Randall described his fellow constable as ‘the kinges officer’, he was giving his office the dignity of the state. Indeed, it is important to note how constables at the time, when they wanted to evoke something close to what we would call the state, usually spoke of ‘the king’. They might talk about putting people in ‘the Kynges gaole’, or making them ‘the kynges prisoner’.53 And, of course, they spoke – as Randall did at least twice – of the ‘Kings peace’. This was a powerful phrase, which was evidently widely used by officers and private citizens in situations of disturbance. The idea of the ‘King’s peace’ had complex origins that went back to Anglo-Saxon times, but by the late middle ages it had evolved into a general guarantee of safety and the absence of disorder, emanating from the King’s person and government and represented locally by the King’s justices ‘of the peace’.54 Crucially, it was something one could evoke when threatened, essentially transforming an act of interpersonal violence into an assault on the state. It can be found in witness statements relating to violence, such as when, supping at a neighbour’s house in Essex in the reign of Edward VI, Robert Dickleigh heard an affray going on in the street and ran outside saying ‘I pray you kepe the Kings peace’.55 One could be bound over to keep the king’s peace, and one could ask local officers and powerbrokers to ‘se the kynges peax kept’.56 Its ubiquity was such that it can be found in the period’s plays.57 It was also, by the late middle ages, a particular responsibility of petty constables or their equivalents. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest a development from the older system of frankpledge, whereby groups of neighbours were responsible for the king’s peace, to one where this became largely the responsibility of the constable or similar officers. To an extent, this marks a transition from medieval communalism to the officeholding ‘republic’ that roughly characterizes English early-modernity. Responsibility for the king’s peace was partially transferred from the community to officer. For now, these were amateur, though in future centuries they would be replaced by professional agents of the state. In turn, then, a crucial way in which this officeholding republic operated was by allowing, and enforcing, private citizens – usually for fixed periods – to carry the magic of state, acting as constables, churchwardens, jurors, and later surveyors of highways and overseers of the poor. This is why Randall was so keen to emphasize that he shouted to keep the King’s peace ‘cryinge as lowde as he cowde’, to make it abundantly clear he was operating in an official capacity. In Tudor terms, this may still have carried connotations of service: like an oral way of wearing the King’s livery, perhaps. But we should not exaggerate the personal nature of this service. John Watts has cautioned us against seeing late medieval officeholding as a form of service. In fact, he points out, it was not necessarily in the interests of the Crown to replace ‘the sense that such services were voluntary and honourable with the fiction that they were conducted at the king’s pleasure and will alone’.58 In any case, ‘the King’s peace’ may not have been thought of as an evocation of the person of the monarch, but the abstract body ‘politic’. It is worth adding here that Randall remained a private citizen. This is, of course, true of modern-day professional police officers, but in Tudor times the amateur nature of office meant this fact was all the more important. Perhaps, like the King, he can be seen as having two bodies, the body of the smalltime merchant who made trade bargains and drank with his friends, and the body of the public officer, who maintained the King’s peace. In real terms, this meant that there was room for what we would term ‘corruption’, the subservience of public interest to private. This appears to have been the temptation that ensnared William Hawkins, Randall’s fellow constable, when he deployed unreasonable violence against Browne the night before the fray. The coroner John Clerk appears to have fallen into this trap too. This, then, is where the invocation of ‘the King’s peace’ becomes so important. In our world, those in authority can often easily be distinguished by their clothes: uniforms are common, as – more recently – is high visibility clothing. In the sixteenth century this was not always possible, so agents of the state had to identify themselves in different ways. Randall did this by invocation: he uttered a phrase that was supposed to raise his actions above those of a petty vigilante, or – worse – someone just settling scores, and to make these actions of state. In such circumstances, the state became something people experienced not only in the person of an officer, but in his words. It was something experienced orally. It was performed. In fact, we should not think of it as just a set of officers, symbols, buildings, and infrastructure like stocks and gallows.59 In Tudor times, as indeed with our own, the state existed in an intangible form, as an idea. It was a performative concept: something invoked and acted out in crucial ‘moments of government’. Those dramatic moments might include the raising of a tax or an army, the presentation of a petition or the serving of a writ, the judgement of a law court or even an execution. Or, they might include the moment where a constable charges between two fighting men crying ‘keep the King’s peace’. CONCLUSION A few years later, the state was drawn into another Weymouth dispute. The case revolved around a group of merchants who were apparently taking horses on their cross-channel voyages without authorization. They claimed to need them for their business activities in Normandy, but they were doing so in contravention of a statute of 1531, and they fell under the unwelcome gaze of the government informer, William Whelplay. On one occasion (17 Sept. 1538), Richard Randall constable said he found himself confronting a dagger-wielding assailant at the quay, ‘this deponent being constable there was callyd upon and sente for to see the kings peace kepte’. Even more strikingly, William Randall himself was called upon to give testimony. He reports that two men, Whelplay and Ellis Broke, were attempting to seize some horses about to be shipped out; they broke down a door to get to them, at which point ‘the people thereaboute made greate noyse’, whereupon Richard Harvest, now constable, ‘ther requyred them to kepe the Kings peace and to delyver theyr weapons’.60 Some words were exchanged, but – it seems – Whelplay and Broke were safely arrested. It ended in Whelplay bringing an information to the court of Exchequer, the Weymouth defendants procuring a writ of nisi prius to bring the case to Shaftesbury Assizes (and presumably a sympathetic local jury) and eventually with Whelplay appealing to Star Chamber. It is a reminder that the state remained a complex mesh of institutions and organizations, and people could find themselves on opposite sides of the state apparatus at the same time: Whelplay was acting as a government informer, but he was arrested in the name of the ‘king’s peace’. But the most stunning piece of evidence, at least for our perspective, comes right at the end of the surviving testimony from this later suit. It is the testimony of Peter Tussey of Weymouth. Tussey was deputy to the searcher at Poole, and a man against whom – Geoffrey Elton suggests – Whelplay had an especial grudge.61 At one point, he was asked to recall an incident from William Randall’s past. He remembers an event that happened ‘abowte viii yeres past to his remembraunce’. ‘This deponents wifes last husband’, Tussey says, ‘whose name was Richard Reynolde was slayne by Wylliam Randall for making seasure of a horse that the same Randalls brother did frayte ther and saith they foughte together in the quarrel and the sayd Richard Reynold was then slayne’. His recollection is wrong: it was at most six years ago. But it is the same incident.62 Finally, then, we have the root cause. It was all to do with the illegal export of horses. Reynold appears to have been seizing them from Browne, who may well have been acting on behalf of Randall’s brother. This means, then, that Randall was defending something which had been made illegal: he was contravening statute law. As much as he was acting on the state’s behalf, ‘keeping the King’s Peace’, he was involved in the subvention of the law. He used the invocation of an abstract concept of King’s peace, of the state, to settle a fight that had originated out of an illegal activity. History has a keen sense of irony. The fundamental point of this essay has been to take one of those rare occasions when, in early Tudor times, we can perform a careful reconstruction of a single, dramatic event to draw out conclusions about the society that produced that event. In particular, this has allowed us to say things about the nature of interpersonal violence, and the nature of the Tudor state. We have seen how brutal violence could be, and how it could draw in a whole community, catalysing alliances of household and service, and bouncing off notions of duty, gender and (perhaps) class. It shows how the state acted as a dramatic player in these moments of violence. It did so through its officers, who undertook considerable personal risk to maintain the King’s peace. They might be unarmed, reaching for the nearest work tool as a way of protecting themselves. Moreover, the state’s assertion of its authority through symbols and rituals was – as yet – limited. It depended on amateur officers risking life, limb and litigation; but it carried a charismatic magic which could be invoked by uttering key phrases, notably in this case by shouting ‘Keep the King’s Peace’. The Tudor state, as much as it was a bundle of officers and institutions, was also a performative concept, something to be invoked at key dramatic moments by key dramatic actors. It would be a while before this changed, if – indeed – it has. Jonathan Healey is Associate Professor in Social History at Kellogg College, Oxford. He has written about the history of poor relief, rural society, and popular politics. His book, The First Century of Welfare: Poverty and Poor Relief in Lancashire, c. 1620–1730 was published in 2014 by the Boydell Press. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700, Cambridge, 2000; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640, Basingstoke, 2002. 2 Michael J. Braddick, ‘State Formation and the Historiography of Early Modern England’, History Compass 2, 2004, p. 2. 3 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It’, Critical Enquiry 20, 1993, pp. 10–35. 4 The key material is in: The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Star Chamber, STAC 2/19/391; also STAC 2/32/95; in the latter set of documents is a commission ordering the collection of depositions; it is dated 20 October, 26 Henry VIII, i.e. to 1534. In the depositions, the events are referred to as taking place at the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross ‘last past’. 5 John Guy, The Court of Star Chamber and its Records to the Reign of Elizabeth I, London, 1985. 6 George Ellis, The History and Antiquities of the Borough and Town of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, Weymouth, 1829; James Crump, Medieval Weymouth: Growth and Decline, Oxford, 2015. 7 John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 5 vols, London, 1964, vol. 1, p. 250. 8 P. N. Dawe, ‘A Dorset Lay Subsidy Roll, 1522–3; A Dorset Lay Subsidy Roll, 1525’, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 27, 1955–6, pp. 11–15, 25–30, 54–7, 73–5, 92–3, 108–10; Dorset Tudor Muster Rolls, 1539, 1542, 1569, ed. T. L. Sloate, Bristol, 1978; Nigel Goose and Andrew Hinde, ‘Estimating Local Population Sizes at Fixed Points in Time: Part II – Specific Sources’, Local Population Studies 78, 2007, pp. 74–88. 9 Testimony of Nicholas Long, husbandman, of Wyke. 10 A Parliamentary petition in the National Archives, dated to around the 1430s, asks for legislation to the effect ‘that no persone that breweth to sell kepe open thair dores nor sell non ale after ix of the cloke after the none to the dawne ryseing from seint Gregorye day to the exaltacion of the Holy Croosse And from that feast of exaltacion unto seint Gregory day after vii of the cloke after the none unto vi of the cloke of the morne’: TNA, Chancery, C 49/40/12. 11 Testimony of an anonymous witness. 12 On a late sixteenth-century map of Weymouth, Melcombe and the Isle of Portland, the Nothe Peninsular is given over to what appear to be small arable fields. If this is accurate, Hope Meadow is probably the open area to the west of these. David Beaton, Dorset Maps, Wimborne, 2001, p. 14. 13 Testimony of John Marcombe, Norman-born servant, of Weymouth. 14 Testimony of Henry Harvest, servant, of Weymouth. 15 Testimony of Richard Harvest, yeoman, of Weymouth. 16 Testimony of John Fowey, yeoman, of Cerne Abbas. 17 Testimony of John Marcombe, Norman-born servant, of Weymouth. 18 As previous note. 19 Testimony of an anonymous witness. 20 Testimony of Richard Harvest, yeoman, of Weymouth. 21 Testimony of Henry Harvest, servant, of Weymouth. 22 As previous note. 23 Testimony of Richard Harvest, yeoman, of Weymouth. 24 Testimony of John Marcombe, Norman-born servant, of Weymouth; testimony of William Apere, weaver of Weymouth. This phrase appears word for word in both depositions. 25 Testimony of John Marcombe, Norman-born servant, of Weymouth; testimony of Thomas Byrte, servant, of Weymouth. 26 Testimony of William Flete, tailor, of Weymouth. 27 Testimony of John Marcombe, Norman-born servant, of Weymouth. 28 As previous note. 29 Testimony of Henry Harvest, servant, of Weymouth. 30 Testimony of an anonymous witness; Testimony of John Marcombe, Norman-born servant, of Weymouth; Testimony of Henry Harvest, servant, of Weymouth; Testimony of Richard Harvest, yeoman, of Weymouth. 31 Testimony of Thomas Spicer, surgeon, of Abbotsbury. 32 Testimony of John Kingdom, mason, of Weymouth. 33 It is attached to the Bill of Complaint: TNA, STAC 2/32/95. 34 Dorset Tudor Muster Rolls, ed. Stoate, p. 75. 35 ‘William Randall of Weymouth, Dorset’, in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. Stanley T. Bindoff, London, 1982. Online at http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509–1558/member/randall-william (accessed 14 July 2016). 36 Testimony of Thomas Birt, servant, of Weymouth. 37 He calls it ‘Saynt Georgis chapel’. This was the old chapel-of-ease for Weymouth, actually dedicated to St Nicholas, but from 1442 also associated with a religious fraternity, the Guild of St George. By the sixteenth century it seems that the chapel itself was known as the ‘Chapell of St George’. It no longer survives, except in the local place and street name ‘Chapelhay’: Ellis, History and Antiquities, p. 98; Crump, Medieval Weymouth, pp. 60–2. 38 To push, in fencing. 39 Dawe, ‘Dorset Lay Subsidy’. 40 Charles V. Phythian-Adams, ‘Rituals of Personal Confrontation in Late Medieval England’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 73, 1991, pp. 65–90. 41 For a thoughtful micro-study of early modern violence: Alan Macfarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth Century England, Oxford, 1981. 42 ‘Thomas Samways II of Melcombe Regis, Dorset’, in History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. Bindoff. Online at http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/samways-%28samwiste%29-thomas-ii-1522-6870 (accessed 14 July 2016). 43 ‘William Bond of London and Lutton, Dorset’, in History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. Bindoff. Online at http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/bond-william-145455-153944 (accessed 14 Sept. 2016). 44 TNA, STAC 2/26/23. STAC 10/4, part 2, fols.35–50. Whelplay was a notorious government informer, active around 1538–43: Geoffrey Elton, Star Chamber Stories, London, 1958, pp. 78–113; the Weymouth case is reconstructed in some detail at pp. 103–8. 45 Garthine Walker, ‘Keeping it in the Family: Crime and the Early Modern Household’, in The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 67–95. 46 David Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 116–36; Martin Ingram, ‘“Scolding Women Cucked or Washed”: a Crisis in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?’, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker, London, 1994, pp. 48–80. On female violence, see Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, Oxford, 2003, pp. 263–6. 47 Capp, When Gossips Meet; John Walter, ‘Faces in the Crowd: Gender and Age in the Early Modern English Crowd’, in The Family, ed. Berry and Foyster, p. 118. 48 Lawrence Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–1980’, Past and Present 101, 1983, pp. 22–33. 49 Phythian-Adams, ‘Rituals of Personal Confrontation’, p. 83. 50 For a thoughtful preliminary discussion of the symbolism of the late-medieval state: John Watts, ‘Looking for the State in later Medieval England’, in Heraldry, Pageantry, and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter R. Coss and Maurice Keen, Woodbridge, 2002, pp. 260–3. 51 Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris, London, 2001, pp. 153–94; Hindle, State and Social Change. 52 The classic study of the constable’s role, albeit for a slightly later period, is Joan R. Kent, The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: a Social and Administrative Study, Oxford, 1986; the case of the shotgun wedding can be found in Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, 21M65/C3/1, pp. 17–21. 53 Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, 21M65/C3/1, pp. 17–21. 54 David Feldman, ‘The King’s Peace, the Royal Prerogative and Public Order: the Roots and Early Development of Binding Over Powers’, Cambridge Law Journal 47, 1988, pp. 101–28. 55 TNA, STAC 3/10/20. 56 TNA, SP 1/94, f. 98, copies of two indictments, Somersetshire, 1535; SP 1/32 f. 81, Petition of Robert Leighton, 1524. 57 For example, Anthony Munday, The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (1598), Act 3, Scene 1; John Fletcher, Love’s Cure, or The Martial Maid (c. 1612–15), Act 4, Scene 3. 58 Watts, ‘Looking for the State’, p. 263. 59 Cf. Paul Griffiths, ‘Punishing Words: Insults and Injuries, 1525–1700’, in The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, ed. Angela McShane and Garthine Walker, London, 2010, pp. 66–85. 60 The language is similar to that in Harvest’s Answer to the initial Bill: STAC 2/27/94. 61 Elton, Star Chamber Stories, p. 87. 62 There is an intriguing question as to how Whelplay’s legal team knew about this in order to put the right question to Tussey. Elton points out that he must have had a network of informers across the port towns, so perhaps one of them had his ear to the ground in Weymouth and thus knew the backstory. See Elton, Star Chamber Stories, pp. 112–13. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Richards, Shaun

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbx054pmid: N/A

Abstract W.B. Yeats’s question ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’ from ‘The Man and the Echo’ (1938), speculatitively postions his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), as the driving force behind the Easter Rising of 1916. While theatre was a powerful factor in creating the cultural-politial climate which gave birth to the Rising, Yeats’s question disingenously gives his play an exclusive influence on events when other playwrights, specifically Patrick Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, who actually led the Rising, had a far better claim to being its dramatic inspiration. This article considers the theatrical influences on the Rising, examining Cathleen ni Houlihan and other plays of the period, and outlines the production history of Yeats’s play as an indication of its post-Rising status, comparing it to that of Sean O’Casey’s play about the Rising, The Plough and the Stars (1926). In 2012 the Republic of Ireland began a Decade of Commemorations marking the centenaries of significant historical events in the country between 1912 and 1922. Central to these was the anniversary of the Easter Rising, which began on 24 April 1916 (Easter Monday) when armed members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army rose against British rule and occupied strategic sites across Dublin. Patrick Pearse, the leader of the Volunteers, read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the city’s General Post Office (GPO), declaring the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies. Although there was some military action in Galway, Wexford and Meath there was little popular support across the country. The rebels in Dublin held out for six days against superior British forces, but on 29 April, with the area around the GPO in ruins and the bulding on fire, Pearse gave the order to surrender. The Rising seemed to have been a failure, but the execution of fifteen of its leaders ignited nationalist sentiment which led ultimately to the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921 and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The Rising was choreographed by a seven-man military council which included three playwrights, and the theatrical nature of the event was marked from the start. Many thought that the preparations for the Rising were rehearsals for a play and the Proclamation, which was printed and ciculated across Dublin, was even mistaken for a playbill. Indeed, as Roy Foster points out in his Vivid Faces: the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 (2016), the Rising was ‘a climatic performance… the result of intense rehearsals conducted since the turn of the century’. Plays and performances created a culture in which miltary action was regarded as a desirable step towards national liberation. And in keeping with this aspect of the Rising the title of my talk, ‘Did that play of mine?’, is taken from W. B. Yeats’s late poem, ‘The Man and the Echo’ (1938): … All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? ‘That play’ was Cathleen ni Houlihan; ‘certain men’, the insurgents of Easter 1916. The poem was written a year before Yeats’s death, but from the moment of its premiere in April 1902 he had a strong sense of the significance of the play: ‘Nothing but a victory on the battlefield could so uplift and enlarge the imagination of Ireland, could so strengthen the National spirit’. Cathleen ni Houlihan, just to remind you, is a short one-act play set in the home of the Gillane famiy where the son, Michael, is about to get married. It takes place in a cottage close to Killala, Mayo, in 1798. This of course is the Year of the French when the troops of Revolutionary France were to land in the west and join the rebellion led by Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. Preparations for the wedding are disrupted by A Poor Old Woman who speaks of the loss of her four green fields and the need for sacrifice in the cause of their liberation. Overcome by her message the bridegroom-to-be abandons plans of marriage and leaves to join the rebellion. The key line occurs at the play’s end as a new arrival is asked if he saw an Old Woman as he approached the cottage and replies ‘No, but I saw a young girl and she had the walk of a queen’. Clearly the Poor Old Woman, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the personification of Ireland, is rejuvenated by the blood of those willing to die for her liberation. The play was staged in Dublin in St Teresa’s Hall, described by one of the actors as a little hall behind a grocer’s shop in Camden Street. It was an amateur production and the set, as an actress recalled, wobbled dangerously. But on each of the three nights of its performance some 300 people crammed in. This was not by chance. The play was produced by Inghinidhe na hÉireann (the Daughters of Ireland), a body of nationalist women which had already been involved in theatrical performances such as those produced by poet and activist Alice Milligan. And in the part of the Poor Old Woman it had Maude Gonne, president of Inghinidhe na hÉireann and a woman known throughout nationalist circles. Well over six feet tall Gonne was a commanding figure and as the All Ireland Review commented, ‘Maud Gonne, the well-known nationalist agitator’, addressed ‘not the other actors, as is usual in the drama, but the audience itself’. This made the performance as much a political rally as a piece of theatre. Yeats added to the overtly nationalist interpretation of the piece, for instance proclaiming in an interview in the United Irishman on 5 May, a month after the production – ‘My subject is Ireland and its struggle for independence’. The success of the production led to the company forming the basis of what was to become the Abbey Theatre, now also known as the National Theatre of Ireland in Dublin, and Cathleen ni Houlihan was a constant in the repertoire. From the founding of the Abbey in 1904 up until 1916 there were no fewer than 350 performances of the play. These would typically be for two or three nights, and frequently on tour, so a few nights in Manchester, Oxford, London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, or in Providence, Long Island, Lowell or Springfield, Massachusetts, Chicago, or Dayton, Ohio, for the tours took in the UK and the USA as well as Ireland. Frank Fay, the directorial force behind the company, spoke of the need for the play ‘to send men away filled with the desire for deeds’ and many of the audience for Cathleen ni Houlihan were aware of what those deeds were likely to be. As the writer and politician, Stephen Gwynn, wrote in 1936: ‘I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot’. And George Bernard Shaw, in 1909, commented: ‘When I see that play I feel it might lead a man to do something foolish’. All this then might suggest that the answer to Yeats’s question was ‘yes’ – that play did send out certain men the English shot. To which the stinging riposte was written years later by the poet Paul Muldoon in ‘7 Middagh Street’, ‘If Yeats had saved his pencil lead, would certain men have stayed in bed?’ But of course it’s a complicated situation that can’t be captured by a simple yes or no. Firstly, it was not Yeats’s play, but was co-authored with Lady Augusta Gregory, the influential dramatist and folklorist, and she would seem to have started the process. ‘All this mine alone’ she wrote on the draft of the opening scene then adding, ‘This with WBY.’ As shown by the role of Inghinidhe na hÉireann in the original production in 1902, an active cultural movement with a strong interest in theatre existed already and there was clearly an audience for such work. Theatre was recognized as fundamental to the national cause. Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, declared: ‘We look to the Irish National Theatre primarily as a means of regenerating the country. The Theatre is a powerful agent in the building up of a nation’. We can start to get some sense of theatre’s ability to achieve this from a review by the writer J. M. Synge of the premiere of Douglas Hyde’s Irish-language play Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope) in 1901. Synge noted that members of the Irish language movement, the Gaelic League, had taken up the majority of the cheaper seats and during an intermission: ‘it happened that the people in the galleries began to sing … They sang the old songs of the people. Until then I had never heard these songs sung in the ancient Irish tongue by so many voices. The auditorium shook. … I saw one head bend down behind a programme and then another. People were weeping’. One sensed, he said ‘that the spirit of the nation had hovered for an instant in the room’. And this was the year before Cathleen Ni Houlihan, so if the 1902 play did plant the seed of 1916, it did so in well-prepared soil. Cathleen Ni Houlihan was not the only work in what was in fact contested terrain. As early as 1899, and in the early years of Yeats and Lady Gregory’s attempts to found a theatre, Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, wrote to the Gaelic League journal, An Claidheamh Soluis, attacking Yeats and his associates as dangerously anti-Irish: ‘Against Mr Yeats personally’, he declared, ‘we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an “Irish” Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed’; and as for the theatre, said Pearse, ‘Let us strangle it at its birth.’ Pearse was both a leader of the Rising and the man who read out the proclamation of the Republic. Just months before the Rising he wrote of Cathleen ni Houlihan, that in his childhood he believed there actually was a woman – Erin – who physically embodied Ireland and, he said, ‘had Mr Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan been then written and I had seen it, I should have taken it not as an allegory, but as a representation of a thing that might happen any day in my house’. Not an allegory but a reality and one which therefore could be lived. As the American critic William Irwin Thompson wrote in 1967 (in one of the first studies of what he termed ‘The Imagination of an Insurrection’), ‘Before Pearse fired a shot he rehearsed insurrection by writing a play about it’. The play to which he referred, The Singer, was written in 1915 and not produced nor published in Pearse’s life-time. However the message of its concluding lines ‘One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world’, equating the death of the rebel with the crucifixion of Christ – both leading to the salvation of the people – is one that permeates Pearse’s writing. What I want to stress then is the place of drama in the preparations for the Rising among those who actually led and fought in it. In writing, particularly with Thomas MacDonagh and Pearse, we can see that a rehearsal of the Rising was being staged – quite literally – in the years leading to 1916. Indeed in the prelude to 1916 McDonagh is quoted as saying ‘I am going to live things that I have before imagined’. His play, When the Dawn is Come, had four performances at the Abbey in October 1908 and its plot, set fifty years in the future, was of insurrection against England – resulting in an Irish victory. It was praised as ‘the first Sinn Féin Drama’ and the editor of the diary of events for St Enda’s, the school founded by Pearse where MacDonagh was a master, noted ‘We were present in a body at Mr McDonagh’s play, When the Dawn is Come, at the Abbey theatre. Our youngest boys came home yearning for rifles’. Pearse himself wrote some eight theatrical pieces, most intended for production by the boys at St Enda’s. The first of these, a historical pageant, was performed at the school in March 1909. Pearse’s comments from that year convey his objectives for the boys who participated in his theatre work. They would leave St Enda’s, he said, ‘under the spell of their beloved hero’, namely the legendary Cúchulain whose statue, sculpted by Oliver Sheppard in 1911, now stands in the GPO as memorial to the Rising. Cúchulain’s solitary and heroic embrace of death made him the subject of Yeats’s plays too, but he was central to Pearse’s educational objectives. A picture in St Enda’s depicted the arming of the young Cúchulain, and underneath Cúchulain’s famous words, ‘I care not though I were to live but one day and night provided my fame and deeds live after me’. Many of the senior boys of the school, actors in the plays and pageants, embraced that ideal, fighting in the Post Office with Pearse and McDonagh, living and dying the parts they had earlier rehearsed. And to add to the complex interrelationship of drama and political action Cathleen ni Houlihan was scheduled to play at the Abbey on Monday 24 April 1916 but had to be cancelled because of the Rising. Sean Connolly, the actor who was due to play the role of the father in the play, had already in March performed in James Connolly’s play Under Which Flag? produced by the Irish Workers Dramatic Company. He took part in the attack on Dublin Castle and was killed trying to raise a rebel flag over the City Hall. The claim is that this was the same flag used in McDonagh’s When the Dawn is Come. True or not, what we see in this blurring of myth and history is the tendency at the time to read the Rising as a performance which was rehearsed in the theatre and to read events through that lens. Yeats, Pearse and McDonagh were not the only ones writing plays about insurrection. On 7 January 1915 Yeats wrote to Lennox Robinson about his play, The Dreamers, which the Abbey had accepted for production. It was about Robert Emmet’s attempted Rising in 1803 and Yeats ended his letter by saying: ‘I believe your play will be the making of us in Dublin this Spring. I imagine it will have many revivals. And with Pierce [sic] and McNiel [sic] flirting with the gallows tree, will be almost topical’. In 1915 these were prophetic words indeed. So, to return to Yeats’s question about Cathleen ni Houlihan – ‘did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?’. The question could be more readily asked and answered in the affirmative by Pearse. But both his and Yeats’s work were elements in a complex cultural and political moment leading to the Rising, in which Yeats’s play could not be considered the sole catalyst. Indeed one might say that Yeats’s play did not so much make the Rising as the Rising made the reputation of the play. Perhaps because of Yeats’s question though, Cathleen ni Houlihan has become associated with the Rising, certainly more than anything by Pearse. Yet it is striking how little it is now performed. Before the Rising it had, as I’ve said, 350 performances. But prior to a rehearsed reading in 2010, its previous production at the Abbey was in 1990, before that in 1984, 1965 and 1950. The play on the subject of 1916 that is performed, however, is Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, first staged in 1926 and critical of the Rising for its nationalist rather than socialist agenda. It has been performed every couple of years at the Abbey since the original production. The longest gap without it being put on there was between 1984 and 1991; in this century it has been staged in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2012 and 2016. In 2016 it was also performed at London’s National Theatre, an indication of how completely it has become the play associated with the Rising. It has not been without controversy, however, and not only because of the disturbances at the time of its premiere in 1926. Indeed at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising in 1966 the Commemoration Committee judged that ‘An O’Casey play during the period of the celebrations would not be in keeping with the spirit of the occasion’. However on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Rising, in 1991, it was staged at the Abbey in a radical expressionist production directed by Garry Hynes. In this production Pearse was present in Act Two, rather than being an off-stage voice, and was dressed in a modern-day business suit and located in the stalls among the audience. Pearse faced a huge mirror set on stage, the back wall of the pub, which reflected him and the audience back at themselves. Here Pearse was seen merely as the precursor of subsequent politicians, for whom gestures were more important than social justice. A similar reading of the Rising was again found in the 2016 Abbey production, which stressed the contemporary relevance of The Plough, with the looters in Act Three seeking out today’s desirable objects such as mobile phones. I don’t think it was a convincing staging but what we can see here in this regular performance of The Plough is that while the Rising continues to have a significant place in the Irish theatre it is mainly through a play which questions, rather than celebrates the idea of sacrifice for the nation. And it’s on that issue of sacrifice that I want to end, and to point to a another play about 1916 which has been on at the Abbey far more recently. Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme was on the main stage throughout August and September 2016. Its subject is the 36th Ulster Division at the Battle of the Somme, which began in July 1916. The play ends as they go into battle with a chilling awareness of what is to come. As one of the men realizes, ‘We’re not making a sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice.’ But the play, as noted by the critic Fintan O’Toole, held out the hope that the sacrifice need not be repeated forever. Given this modern sensibility it is understandable why O’Casey’s play – along with McGuinness’s - should be staged in 2016 rather than Kathleen Ni Houlihan. And while Yeats asked if that play had sent out certain men the English shot we need to remember that he asks the question with no sense of pride. He also asks, not if he inspired the Rising, but if he could have stopped it: Could my spoken words have checked That whereby a house lay wrecked? And all seems evil until I Sleepless would lie down and die. Shaun Richards is Emeritus Professor of Irish Studies at Staffordshire University. He has published widely on Irish drama in major journals and essay collections, most recently a chapter on realism in early twentieth-century Irish drama in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (2016). He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Irish Drama (2004) and, with Chris Morash, Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013). © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Stoller, Sarah

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbx063pmid: N/A

Abstract Over the course of the 1970s, feminists in Britain and elsewhere in the West came together to expose the hidden labour involved in caring for men, for the home, and for dependents. This paper explores how the activists of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain forged a multifaceted politics of care. While highlighting the drudgery of and exploitation underlying women’s caring work, activists also appealed to a positive notion of caring as the basis for a new feminist sisterhood. By the late 1970s, the reconfiguration of the labour market and state services in Britain had lent questions of women’s work a new resonance. Tracing how feminists sought to capture and communicate the conditions of women’s caring work sheds light on both the transformation of Britain’s political economy in this period and a neglected area of second-wave feminism. In 1972 the Cambridge Women’s Liberation group published an essay that had first appeared in Italian earlier the same year. Its author began: We have discovered our invisible work, the enormous quantity of work that women are forced to perform every day … this work, which consists of having children and taking care of them, feeding a man, keeping him tidy and cheering him up after work is never presented as such. She went on to say: We are looking at our work in a new way. We have been taught to see that work as an expression of our femininity, in which, we are told, our finest quality – generosity – is fully expressed in giving others security and serenity … we now see that work as a socially necessary activity which must be paid for …1 Over the course of the 1970s, feminists in Britain and elsewhere in the West raised questions about the nature of work and criticized the gendered division of labour. They argued that the undervaluing of women’s work lay at the heart of troubled relations between men and women and viewed the transformation of this work as a necessary condition for the formation of new types of intimacy. By the late 1970s British feminists routinely referred to the ‘burden of care’ that seemed to fall automatically to women as the emotional centres of households and called for a rethinking of caring within the home and beyond.2 The issues of household work, paid employment, and women’s social roles as carers were combined in the crucible of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) as activists sought to challenge women’s status theoretically and politically. By drawing attention to the emotional labour performed by women and to the commodification pervading intimacy, activists in Britain responded and contributed to a shift underway in both the affective and political economies of labour. The highpoint of feminist activism in Britain in the 1970s coincided with a major restructuring of the British labour force with corresponding consequences for family life. Between 1951 and 1971, the proportion of married women in work in Britain doubled from twenty-three to forty-six percent.3 British women’s overall labour-force participation continued to rise in the 1970s, from fifty-two to sixty-five per cent.4 This growth was fuelled in large part by the expansion of part-time employment.5 As women entered the workforce, they did so primarily in the lower-paid female-dominated sectors of the economy – personal services, clerical, health, education, welfare, and sales.6 While women’s rates of employment outside of the home increased in the 1970s, they nonetheless continued to perform a disproportionate share of household work. In 1988 the British Social Attitudes Survey found that women employed part time were responsible for housework in eighty-eight percent of households. In families where both partners worked full time, the figure remained seventy-two percent, and in unemployed households it remained seventy-six percent.7 By the end of the twentieth century, there was some indication of growing male involvement in domestic work, though men were much more likely to spend time with children than to carry out tasks such as cleaning, cooking and laundry.8 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide ‘Capitalism also depends on domestic labour’, See Red Women’s Workshop, Poster, London, 1975. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide ‘Capitalism also depends on domestic labour’, See Red Women’s Workshop, Poster, London, 1975. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide ‘My wife doesn’t work’, See Red Women’s Workshop, Poster, London, 1976. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide ‘My wife doesn’t work’, See Red Women’s Workshop, Poster, London, 1976. As women mobilized around a broad array of feminist concerns in the 1970s, questions of women’s work both inside and outside the home had a new salience. The subject of women’s household work, first raised by nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminists, had re-emerged as a political theme in the postwar West as early as 1949 with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In the 1960s the issue gained steam, particularly in the wake of Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique. While historians have yet to thoroughly consider the contemporary history of women and work, as early as the 1950s British sociologists explored the subject of married women’s paid work and its effects on family life. By the 1960s social scientists had begun to articulate scepticism about John Bowlby’s famous claim that children deprived of maternal attention would suffer lasting damage. Although these works contributed to a growing consciousness about women’s work both paid and unpaid, it was in the 1970s that women’s household work became the subject of sustained debate and political activism.9 In the 1970s, consciousness-raising groups generated insights about women’s everyday experiences, just as families faced new economic pressures.10 Both contributed to the emergence of a more diverse and often more radical set of perspectives on household labour. These new theoretical and political perspectives represented an effort to understand not only women’s caring work, but work and its relationship to the family and the state more broadly. At conferences, in consciousness-raising groups and classrooms, as well as in pamphlets, posters, and essays both personal and political, activists sought to account for and theorize women’s household labour. Feminists articulated the ways in which the shifting political-economic environment, the disintegration of the male-breadwinner wage and the forms of welfare provision built around it, and the rise of women’s low-wage work had rendered women’s affective labour more demanding. Household work became a site where feminists struggled over the tension between criticizing state policy and demanding greater state support, as well as challenging prevailing norms of family life. As with all subjects of feminist activism in the 1970s, questions of household labour and its relationship to socio-political life were hotly debated on both a theoretical and practical basis. The nuanced views and strategies that emerged as a result in turn reflected the diverse origins of women’s politicization – not only on university campuses but also in families and neighbourhood communities.11 In 1972, Selma James and Mariosa Dalla Costa published The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and sparked an international domestic-labour debate and more than a decade of attempts to theorize women’s household work within Marxist categories.12The Power of Women also became the impetus for the formation of an international campaign for Wages for Housework (WFH) with chapters in Britain, Italy, the US, Germany, Canada and elsewhere. While in their early work James and Dalla Costa were ambiguous about whether women should actually be paid a wage for household labour, a campaign for WFH quickly solidified around this demand. Over the course of the 1970s, WFH generated heated controversy. Although it never attracted the support of more than a minority of feminists in Britain, it drew attention to women’s invisible work and was generative of a broad spectrum of politics around caring which extended well beyond a two-sided acceptance or rejection of the campaign’s particular agenda. Tracing these debates over household labour serves as one entry point into the ways in which feminist activists forged a new type of politics.13 Greater distance from the intellectual and political debates of the 1970s has made possible a reassessment of the women’s liberation movement that acknowledges how, amidst tremendously varied feminisms, women found common ground. Feminist efforts to politicize women’s household work, though they generated intense disagreement, seemed to many to offer the chance to unite women around a common sense of oppression. While historians of the British WLM have noted activists’ critiques of the invisibility of women’s work, they have yet to explore the full richness of feminist politics surrounding household labour. The earliest histories of the women’s movement, first published in the 1980s, focused predominantly on the national political trajectory of the WLM and on questions about the rise and fall of organized activism.14 They tended to downplay the concerns with selfhood and intimate life which set 1970s feminism apart from its predecessors, and to emphasize divisions among organizers in an effort to account for the WLM’s demise.15 In the last decade, new scholarship has challenged rise-and-fall narratives of the WLM and opened up a much broader set of questions about the political, social, and cultural dimensions of 1970s feminism. Together, products of this new scholarship have highlighted the huge diversity of views and strategies which came under the umbrella of the WLM and have emphasized a longer, more uneven and more local history of the movement.16 More work is needed to chart the ways in which feminists theorized and mobilized support around the broad range of feminist concerns, most often on the local and regional scales, and what drew them together to do so in the first place. Feminists offered a multiple and at times conflicted analysis of women’s caring activities. On the one hand they sought to describe women’s household work as insidious drudgery legible within a broader public context of exploitative patriarchal capitalism. On the other hand they articulated the social value of caring and lamented both the existing and imagined consequences of its reduction to mere work. In this context, feminists at times imagined the work of tending to men and the physical tasks of the home separately from the work of caring for children and other dependents. By articulating the feelings of alienation that could arise from navigating between seemingly endless public and private realms of labour, feminists called for the space to enact different types of caring communities. In doing so, they forged a politics of sisterhood that, however inadequate and incompletely realized, had transformative consequences for the lives of many women. CARING FOR MEN In an essay written in 1975 about the political organization of the WLM, one activist lamented the fact that the women’s movement had made no formal demands for the transformation of housework or the reconfiguration of marital relationships. As a result, she wrote, one of the great sources of strength and passion in the movement finds no expression and is given no direction in our common demands. This source of passion is the daily experience of oppression by men – at home for some – outside it for others – which has led to a wish to reconstitute the social conditions of the relationship between men and women.17 If the transformation of social relations between men and women in the home was resistant to encapsulation in a single demand analogous to contraception or equal pay, it was no less a political goal of 1970s feminists. At the heart of feminist analyses of troubled intimate relations was the role of women in the family – the expectation that ‘as a wife, woman caters for her husband’s needs both physical and emotional..’.18 In telling language, feminists frequently characterized this social expectation as a form of exploitation of women as workers – ‘using women to service the male labour force physically, sexually, emotionally, and psychologically’.19 By invoking the concept of service, feminists implicitly linked the work performed by women in the household to the prevailing conditions of women’s paid work beyond it. While maintaining that patriarchy was a long-term historical reality, feminists suggested that the presence of unequal labour relations in the home was unnatural, and responsible for precluding genuine forms of intimacy. Women’s growing participation in the workforce in the 1970s pitted the demands of home against the demands of paid work for an unprecedented number. Women who did not enter the labour market also experienced new pressures both economic and cultural. In essays, in consciousness-raising groups, and at conferences, middle and working-class activists sought to develop a language for making sense of women’s experiences of home and work that would be available to women of diverse backgrounds. Exposing the hidden work involved in caring for men provided a means of articulating a variety of different everyday experiences of oppression and imagining the possibility of a transformation in men’s and women’s intimate relationships. Activists rejected the blanket expectation that they should care and sought to reinvent intimacy so that caring could be freed from work and remade as an expression of love. Among 1970s feminist campaigns, the international movement for Wages for Housework (WFH) was the most fervent in its insistence that the social expectation that women act as caregivers for men constituted the exploitation of women as workers. The foundational premise of WFH was that all women are housewives, regardless of employment or marital status. Influenced by the Italian tradition of autonomist Marxism, the campaign understood housework as a form of productive labour that produced surplus value. This contrasted with other Marxist-feminist positions in circulation that viewed women’s work within the family in terms of reproductive labour.20 For WFH, housework was principally ‘the most pervasive manipulation, the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class’.21 For supporters of the campaign, the particular insidiousness of capitalism in the case of housework depended upon the ideological mystification of women’s work as love and self-sacrifice. The texts of WFH argued that ‘servicing men’ was analogous to servicing capital.22 Building on insights gleaned from consciousness-raising, Wages for Housework made clear that love could be experienced as a work duty. It was not only supporters of the WFH campaign who sought to expose the entwinement of women’s work with men’s and women’s intimate relationships. From the outset, WFH provoked fierce controversy with its demand that women be paid a wage for their household labour. Many objected that a wage would simply function to further entrench women’s association with the domestic and deepen the gendered division of labour, leaving intimate relations unchanged. Others opposed the confrontational tactics of WFH activists within the WLM. Nonetheless, the campaign’s analyses echoed through the movement, provoking greater engagement with the question of household work.23 In a 1973 pamphlet one activist who opposed a housework wage argued that the real nature of household work as work was mystified as ‘the established, recognised way of expressing the woman’s affection for a man, so that he expects it. If he doesn’t get it he feels insecure, uncared for, deprived’.24 In highlighting women’s invisible caring work, few activists aimed to reject the possibility of loving family relations. Instead, they hoped to destabilize the supposed naturalness of the model of the male-breadwinner family that formed the basis of British social policy. Although few activists viewed a housework wage from the state as a likely path to the transformation of intimate relations, or identified with the position of WFH activists in the women’s movement, activists widely agreed that the naturalized expectation that women care constituted a powerful form of oppression. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide ‘Wages for Housework: Notice to all Governments’, New York Wages For Housework Committee, c. 1975. Text by Judy Quinlan of Toronto Wages for Housework. Courtesy of Silvia Federici. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide ‘Wages for Housework: Notice to all Governments’, New York Wages For Housework Committee, c. 1975. Text by Judy Quinlan of Toronto Wages for Housework. Courtesy of Silvia Federici. This form of oppression was also seen as key to understanding women’s roles in the public sphere. In 1973 Esther Ronay described the expectation that she would care for men at work in her job as an assistant film editor simply because she was a woman: ‘I was expected to keep [men] company at lunch and dinner if they were working late and they were alone … I was a housewife at work and at home’.25 At a moment when British women were entering the labour market to occupy primarily low-paid, mainly part-time jobs in the growing service economy, the language of service had a new force. When one activist noted, ‘we are trained to serve others …’, she could as easily have been describing the public as the private experience of many women.26 Selma James of WFH frequently invoked the concept of service to transcend precisely these boundaries. In 1977 James told a WFH meeting, ‘women are laid off first because they will do the same service work at home for free’.27 In a 1978 essay on typewriting for Spare Rib, Clare Cherrington characterized white-collar secretarial work, too, as an exercise in ‘servicing the boss’.28 In drawing attention to the oppressive weight of social expectations on intimate life, feminists developed a language which also described the analogous demands on ever-larger numbers of women as paid employees. Implicit in this new criticism was an effort to distinguish between the forms of paid work commonly performed by women and the much broader realm of study, vocation, and community in which women might conceivably seek fulfilment. To feminists, the fact that women were ‘trained to serve others’ had particularly profound consequences for women’s sexuality. That women were urged to deny their own desires in order to prioritize men’s precluded their true self-actualization. Lesbian women who had been discouraged, if not prevented, from expressing their sexuality wrote particularly poignantly about their experiences of oppression. Training to serve others began young: ‘From the time we are children our personalities, and therefore our sexuality are moulded to fit the unwaged work that capitalist society forces on women … our sex lives are as ruled by capital as our “work lives”… our entire lives are made into work’.29 Women’s training constituted a process of unlearning natural impulses and learning to serve men in places of formal as well as informal labour. Feminists envisioned a wide variety of paths to a more equal set of relations between men and women, but all were based on a fundamental recognition of women’s hidden work. To draw attention to the labour relations permeating intimate life was to refuse women’s unfair share of this burden. Far from rejecting love, activists instead sought to reimagine its economies and reconstitute intimacy between men and women on equal terms. In contrast to feminists’ more varied evaluations of caring for children and other dependents, in their commentary on ‘servicing men,’ activists were straightforward about their anger and sense of oppression. Over the course of the 70s, women’s concerns began to be heard. Men’s consciousness-raising groups that emerged from London to Leeds by the mid-70s in solidarity with the goals of the WLM urged men to take responsibility for household work as a way of combating sexism and generating a new basis for intimate relations.30 In addition to articulating a demand for change, discussing men’s and women’s relations in terms of work gave voice to a new consciousness of the shifting nature of labour in the late-twentieth century, and of women’s relationship to it. CARING FOR DEPENDENTS As feminists generated a critique of women’s status that highlighted the position of women as workers, they came up against new points of tension. Whereas activists widely rejected what they understood as women’s social roles as service-providers for men, when it came to the issue of caring for dependents, they struggled more deeply with whether to think of caring as a form of work or to imagine it as something more. The demand for free round-the-clock childcare, agreed upon at the first women’s movement conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, was one of the first four demands of British feminists. From the outset, activists also drew attention to the centrality of women in caring for the elderly and infirm. Over the course of the 1970s, they argued for, collected, and analysed government and independent research that documented the nature and extent of state provision for families and from 1976 they routinely argued that cuts to welfare services hit women hardest.31 As a group of women at the London Hospital put it in the wake of 1976–7 National Health Service (NHS) spending cuts, ‘We women have to take the brunt of all the cuts – we have to work harder at home, spend longer shopping to try and find cheap food, nurse the sick at home … look after the children longer’.32 Feminist thinking about care for dependents, however, ran deeper than the straightforward insistence on more comprehensive state services. To create a society in which care was a shared responsibility and value meant struggling both in and against the state. Activists demanded that state resources be directed towards the support of necessary caring work, while at the same time challenging the state’s narrow conception of families and imagining alternative forms of provision in communities.33 Alongside visions of remade relations between men and women, activists articulated the desire for altogether new kinds of parent-child relationships and approaches to child and eldercare.34 While some activists described the work of caring for dependents as a burden which shaped women’s lives both inside and outside of households, others worried that to describe caring for dependents as work would undermine the autonomy and influence women possessed through their alleged expertise as carers. Others still suggested that caring was a value unto itself, irreducible to the language of work. Throughout the 1970s, WLM activists amassed voluminous research on women’s paid work, nursery places, family benefits and the NHS in order to educate themselves and the public about the issues of child and eldercare and state support for families. In October 1975, a pamphlet released by the Working Women’s Charter Campaign in London reported that there were only five free nursery places for every 1,000 pre-school aged children in Britain and highlighted a dramatic decline in the number of state nurseries in the postwar period: from over 900 in 1949 to under 500 in 1970. This transformation, they took pains to point out, had occurred over the same period in which women’s paid employment had expanded dramatically. The campaign’s activists lamented the fact that the small gains made in child-care provision in the 70s had largely been accomplished through private initiatives rather than comprehensive national reform.35 In 1978 activists associated with the Campaign for Women’s Financial and Legal Independence similarly decried the privatization of childcare, commenting, ‘We believe that childcare is a social responsibility and should be provided by the state’.36 This was understood to be as much for the benefit of children, who would flourish in other children’s company, as for mothers. Here and elsewhere, feminists rejected John Bowlby’s claim that children deprived of maternal care would suffer psychological damage.37 Feminists also linked care for children to care for the sick and elderly. They noted that three out of four old people in Britain unable to care for themselves were being cared for not by state or private institutions but by the community, ‘and this means by their wives, daughters, or daughters in law’. Three times as many old people reportedly lived with a married daughter compared to a married son.38 A key goal of feminist activism was to highlight the burden of care on women and to demand state support for dependents. Implicit in this demand was the insistence that women be supported in their decisions to have children and to care for relatives as much as their decisions not to. Black activists, in particular, insisted on the right to have children and were often critical of the women’s movement for its focus on abortion rights seemingly at the expense of the rights of women to be supported in caring for the children they did choose to have.39 Demanding state support did not, however, imply a failure to criticize it. Feminists were vocal critics of the gendered welfare state with its model of the male-breadwinner family. Black feminists were at the forefront of vocalizing the failures and hypocrisy of state intervention in their communities and drew attention to the racialized as well as gendered dynamics of these policies.40 Labelling care for dependents as work seemed to present the opportunity to unite a diverse group of women around common experiences and to describe and challenge women’s second-rate status. Far from seeking to discredit the value and potential rewards of caring for dependents, by adopting a language that highlighted the drudgery of this work, activists took aim at the social expectation that women should care. A pamphlet released by the London WFH Committee after 1976 offered a typical analysis which linked women’s domestic lives to both paid work and state policy: ‘The Labour government has chosen its cuts carefully. And we women are the prime target … education and nursery cuts take away our jobs as teachers, cooks and cleaners and increase our work at home – DOING THE SAME WORK FOR FREE’.41 Feminist essays and pamphlets regarding the experiences of women as paid workers made similar connections between caring work within and beyond the home. In 1974, a news report ‘by and for women’ addressed the issue of low pay in nursing. ‘No wonder nurses are so exploited in a society that expects women to care for others in the home without even dignifying them with the title of workers and can therefore fool itself that nurses, who do what is regarded as traditional women’s work, do not need to be paid a decent wage.’42 Feminists drew attention to the drudgery involved in caring for children, the old and the infirm, whether for pay or otherwise, and many comfortably described these responsibilities as work. This characterization had two powerful qualities – it incorporated concerns of some working as well as middle-class activists, and it promised to elevate the status of women’s activities. Concerns about women’s economic dependence on men had been a crucial preoccupation of WLM activists from the outset, and in 1974 a demand for financial and legal independence for all women was added to the formal demands of the women’s movement. In this context, labelling care for dependents as work presented a powerful basis for demanding financial independence. Over the course of the 1970s, the WFH campaign committed itself fully to this task. But WFH was not alone. Even those who opposed a housework wage, including those who advocated the complete socialization of care, linked the insistence that women have an income of their own to demands for more flexible and more shared care of the young, sick and elderly.43 Some however, including activists who advocated the socialization of some forms of household work through shared kitchens and laundries, resisted the categorization of childrearing and eldercare as work analogous to any other. At an open discussion session held at a 1973 conference, one organizer remarked: ‘I think that to treat child-rearing as a job, in a society where jobs are seen as evil necessities, could have bad effects on mothers and children’.44 To treat child-care as work seemed likely to diminish its perceived value, and perhaps to tie women even more closely to it. At the root of this concern were anxieties about risking the diminution of women’s existing socio-political status in the pursuit of a more equal society. However troubled the realm of home and family, it remained an area in which many women felt they could exert a degree of influence and creativity. The structure of the Birmingham women’s liberation playgroups organized from 1970 and ’71 testifies to the nuanced views of childcare within the WLM. Activists established a regular rota of volunteer shifts in which women and men worked in pairs to mind children and hired a paid employee to support them. In doing so, they acknowledged the labour inherent in caring for children and the potential alienation of having to do so in isolation. At the same time, organizers embraced the task of reimagining child-rearing, by rewriting children’s fairy tales and developing new materials and games in line with their vision of an equitable society.45 As historian Catherine Hall remembers, ‘we were absolutely claiming the sphere of children and home as ours and redefining it’.46 Concerns about labelling child and eldercare as work were elaborated elegantly by Caroline Freeman, a socialist feminist writing from Bristol, who opposed the WFH campaign. Freeman argued for a distinction between childcare and the rest of housework that was implicit but rarely made explicit in other women’s writing on household labour. Noting that women would be sad to sacrifice some of the autonomy linked to their role as carers, she wrote nonetheless, ‘we want the state to provide public and free facilities for the care of children’. This, she believed, would allow women to continue to be involved in shaping the type of care children received and the content of their education. Acknowledging that women desired involvement in the care of their dependents was a potentially divisive statement in a movement conflicted over the idea that women might be naturally inclined towards caring roles.47 In Freeman’s eyes, housework was another matter entirely: ‘as far as the rest of housework goes, we want to do as little of it as possible and we want there to be as little of it as possible for anyone to do’. Ultimately her greatest concern was about the emotional and psychological consequences of recognizing the home as just one more workspace, even if it was indeed that way for a majority of women: ‘If we had Wages for Housework we should be more like those workers outside the home who are expected to sell their commitment as an integral part of their labour power, so that work is constantly with them, at meals, at leisure, in bed’.48 In the 1970s feminists were at the forefront of articulating the alienating consequences of a world in which even the most intimate forms of caring for dependents could be commodified and in which there remained few, if any, spaces outside of work. Alongside this debate feminists generated a variety of visions of a liberated community of care. Although there was never consensus, and the movement was firmly resistant to uniformity of perspective, many British feminists agreed on certain features. Ideal child-care would be community based, involve men integrally, provide for school-age as well as nursery-age children, cover school holidays, have flexible hours, and be financed by the state.49 Care for the elderly, too, would be local, comprehensive, and compassionate.50 A world in which care for the elderly and for children was shared more equally – both between men and women and between state and the private family – was viewed as one in which everyone would thrive. In discussions about whether caring for dependents could be best understood as work, feminists approached an uncomfortable boundary between acknowledging the unique challenges faced by women as caring heads of households and altogether rejecting the household as a conceivable space for women’s liberation. LOCATING THE SELF In feminist essays and pamphlets, the words care and caring often appear in italics or quotation marks. Throughout the 1970s, the concept of caring was called into question for its problematic position in feminist thought at the intersection between public and private worlds. What did ‘care’ mean, activists asked, when it could be mobilized to deny families the opportunity to care for themselves and facilitate discriminatory state intervention into women’s lives? As one group of black activists for WFH put it, ‘We have to fight social services departments, who put our children into “care” rather than give us the money to look after them ourselves’.51 And what did the expectation that women ‘care’ mean when they didn’t, but were nevertheless required to perform caring, whether for pay or otherwise?52 Many feminists understood the alienating work of affecting attachment and detachment as integral to women’s unique position in families and in society more broadly. As women found a language to articulate this alienation, they exposed the costs to women’s identities and pointed to the need for time and space outside of labour for women. Over the course of the 1970s, activists drew attention to the psychological costs for women of continually navigating between paid and unpaid realms of caring work. The precise nature of these costs could be difficult to pin down. In her 1978 article on secretarial work, Clare Cherrington observed, ‘while the factory worker just sells her labour, the secretary sells labour plus behaviour … and there seems to be a very particular mental alienation going on’.53 Five years earlier in an essay on her experiences working as a typist, an activist named Helen had reflected: ‘They expect you to be part of their scene – a cheerful cog in a cheerless machine’. For Helen and many others, the experience of forced emotion at work carried on at home: ‘The effort required to switch from the structure to human relationships gets heavier and heavier. I come home too exhausted to think and find myself forced to relate somehow to the people I live with’.54 In paid work and in the household, women railed against the performance of emotion that seemed to obscure both day-to-day emotional realities and the possibility of forging genuine intimacy. Feminist writing on the burdens of caring work in the 1970s pointed continually to the difficulties faced by women in locating their own desires, ambitions, and identities amidst a multitude of expectations and responsibilities. Italian-American feminist Silvia Federici’s translated and much read 1974 pamphlet offers a haunting account of emotional commodification: ‘our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualised’.55 Federici was not alone in articulating a sense of self ‘distorted’, or simply ‘lost’ to the demands on women’s time. Reflecting on her experiences raising young children in the 1960s, Ann Oakley notes: ‘my memory is dominated by this feeling of total exhaustion and totally being swallowed up, and totally not understanding how badly I felt’.56 Feminists highlighted the roles played by isolation, guilt, and sheer exhaustion in obscuring their identities in both their public and private lives.57 As the York, Hull, Leeds and Durham women’s groups put it in a 1972 essay on the housewife, ‘she does not belong to herself’.58 From the outset of the women’s movement, activists devoted enormous attention to documenting their daily schedules. Accounting for where and how women spent their time came to play a central role in consciousness raising, in feminist essays, and in early women’s-studies courses. In part this constituted an effort to acknowledge women’s existence as historical actors, but it also reflected a desire to identify moments and sites of freer self-realization in women’s everyday lives. As Beatrix Campbell and Valerie Charlton observed in an essay in Red Rag in 1978, ‘Women have a completely different relationship to time from men. That derives from their qualitatively different relationship to children and domestic life and labour’.59 Between the lines of making tea, packing lunches, organizing children, chasing down buses, and in many cases rushing off to paid jobs was the glaring subtext that women had few if any spaces and moments in which to think about themselves. In one characteristic schedule collected as an assignment for an early women’s sociology course in London, the author makes only one allusion to her own interests in a two-page account of a day filled with household work.60 A personal essay entitled ‘A Woman’s Day’ first published in 1982 in Merseyside Women’s Paper outlines the minutiae of household work carried out by the author before 9:30 in the morning. It is only in the final paragraph as she races onto the bus that she is able to sit down and collect herself. She concludes, ‘I can think about myself today, well, half the day anyway. I’m on my way to my women’s history class, so I’m feeling better already’.61 The demand for space and time to ‘think about one’s self’ was not an individualistic one that prized self-actualization over the interests of the community. In the 1970s, new communities were central to the formation of new identities and ambitions for women. For the British women who organized politically in the WLM, the call for liberation was articulated, however clumsily, with a concept of all of womanhood in mind. The process of locating oneself was understood to depend upon transcending individual understandings of problems and existing in caring communion with other women. SPACES FOR SISTERHOOD In Britain, as elsewhere in the West, some activists looked to women’s paid employment and equal legal status as the surest ways to remove women from the hidden, isolating work of the household and liberate them to pursue their desires. But feminists also imagined other paths to more liberated modes of selfhood within the worlds of home and community. Responding to the sense that patriarchy and capitalism had rendered genuine expressions of caring hollow, many activists sought to develop strategies that would enable women to forge relationships on the basis of desire rather than responsibility. The interrelated projects of building new communities, engaging in creative activities, and giving free expression to sexual desire were held as key paths to reinventing caring as an expression of self unmediated by obligation. Activists encouraged their communities not only to share more equally in the work of caring, but also to think of caring as a social good with virtues irreducible to the logic of labour. Above all, they sought to embody the values of care, creativity and free expression in the women’s movement itself. In doing so they embarked on a project which, while in in many ways inadequate and always unfinished, succeeded in creating new spaces for sisterhood. Among British feminist campaigns, the movement for Wages for Housework was particularly fervent in its vision of a liberated womanhood wholly apart from the expansion of women’s paid work. In 1971, James and Dalla Costa wrote: The struggle of the working woman is not to return to the isolation of the home, appealing as this sometimes may be on Monday morning any more than a housewife’s struggle is to exchange being imprisoned in a house for being clinched to desks or machines, appealing as this sometimes may be compared to the loneliness of the 12th story flat. Women must completely discover their own possibilities which are neither mending socks nor becoming captains of ocean-going ships.62 These possibilities were clarified more fully by Silvia Federici two years later: ‘We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love and create what will be our sexuality which we have never known’.63 WFH’s vision of women’s liberation was a utopian one that depended not on a reconfiguration of existing labour but on its radical reduction. The contentious WFH campaign was just one of many varied approaches to articulating the need for time and space outside of menial labour for women.64 The need for spaces in which women could meet and discover new possibilities emerged as a central theme of feminist writing and practice over the course of the 1970s. Within a movement that operated largely in the absence of national structures and leadership, local and community based organizations formed the backbone of activism. Significantly, the women’s centres, refuges, playgroups and workshops that emerged from local initiatives often existed in private homes, or in abandoned or otherwise temporary premises.65 Finding and securing spaces to meet never ceased to be a problem for the women’s movement, even as it gained relatively more institutional stability through women’s-studies departments, feminist bookshops, and libraries.66 The continual effort to establish and protect these spaces reflected that, for many women, it was the community of the women’s movement itself that promised new kinds of experiences of selfhood and connection. Activists wrote powerfully about their efforts to find time to participate in the movement and the challenges of having to balance the desires to ‘belong with other women’ and to engage politically with the private realities of the everyday grind.67 Over the course of the 1970s, activists sought to remake their intimate as well as public worlds. For many women, this began with ending troubled romantic relationships. For others, it meant entering into romantic or sexual partnerships with other women or rejecting monogamy or the nuclear family and seeking other models of family organization and childrearing altogether.68 For many, it involved beginning to demand that household work be shared in order that everyone had some free time and space for non-work activities. American feminist Pat Mainardi’s essay The Politics of Housework, published in 1970 and widely read and circulated among British feminists, advocated that women pursue an active programme of insisting that men share in domestic work in their households.69 In tongue-in-cheek style, Mainardi outlines the resistance women were likely to encounter in the course of their campaigns: ‘He is feeling it more than you. He’s losing some leisure and you’re gaining it. The measure of your oppression is his resistance’.70 Mainardi’s humour belied the frequently fraught and long-term process of renegotiating the division of household labour within families.71 Feminist goals also extended beyond the insistence on a more equal division of household labour. In line with the conflicted feminist perspectives on caring for children and the elderly or infirm, was the inclination of many activists to reimagine caring as a positive social good. Within the women’s movement, this was reflected in the language of sisterhood and the determination to forge a politics that could represent all women. In an essay published in 1994, activist Jill Radford reflects on her involvement in the Winchester Women’s Liberation Group between 1975 and 1981. The Winchester group was a small organization with ten or so members. While it was, like much of the women’s movement, predominantly white and middle class, two of its founding members were black. Working-class and lesbian women were also represented as were a range of age groups and political backgrounds. Radford remembers it as an animated community in which heated disagreements were matched by strong friendships. For Radford, sisterhood meant more than meeting for consciousness raising in which, she perceives in retrospect, issues of race and class were often inadvertently marginalized. It also meant ‘providing support for each other when we were in trouble … staying over nights in each other’s houses, when police refused to attend domestic violence calls … picking each other up from casualty departments, minding each other’s children’. For Radford, the practice of caring allowed women to begin to forge trust across what were often sharp, sometimes irresolvable, political differences.72 The deep and enduring friendships forged through the WLM were a profound revelation for many activists, and represented a shift from earlier modes of friendship in their lives. While the women’s movement was hardly the first context in which female friendships emerged, the nature of these relationships and the meanings ascribed to them were singular. Reflecting on her adolescence and young adulthood, Cynthia Cockburn remembers that women in her life prior to her involvement in the WLM had been ‘mainly vehicles to men’. She recalls, ‘I didn’t take women seriously, as people, as friends, and it was not until the women in Union Place began to single each other out as women, and get a certain solidarity as women that I began … to identify as a woman, as a feminist in a way’.73 For Cockburn, and many others, the process of becoming a feminist was integrally a process of acknowledging and occupying space with other women for the first time.74 The consequences could be electric. Beatrix Campbell reflects: I can still remember as if it was yesterday, or today even, the extraordinary frisson of being in a room full of women, and only women. And I had never, ever, in my adult life, willingly been in a room only with women. And I thought they were all gorgeous and went on thinking that everybody, all these women were gorgeous. And it was dangerously exciting. It was dangerous and unsettling and absolutely thrilling.75 The possibilities for intimacy suggested by women coming together in new ways were for some truly alluring. Activists remember the friendships they developed in the WLM as deeply intimate relationships that took centre stage in their emotional and political worlds.76 These bonds were forged through collective work around childcare, campaigning, writing and thinking, as much as through the celebration of women’s emotions, bodies, and sexualities. For many activists, the WLM brought them into contact with politically and intellectually like-minded women for the first time. Barbara Taylor remembers the pleasure of meeting Sally Alexander and the delight of finding herself ‘surrounded by women like me, who were completely unembarrassed about the pursuit of an intellectual life, and whose appetite for it was as great as mine’.77 For others, the novelty of friendship within the WLM was that it facilitated a sense of caring about women very different from themselves. Through her participation in the WLM, Susie Orbach experienced for the first time the sense that friendship could be about bonding without cloning. Connecting to and caring about other women did not depend on sharing the same set of experiences.78 The ideal of a sisterhood which could transcend difference remained no doubt for some elusive. Mukami McCrum recalls longing for a feeling of sisterhood in which disagreements did not mean disunity and articulates a persistent sadness that this felt out of reach.79 An awareness of the limitations of sisterhood was perhaps most pronounced for black activists who experienced alienation from the agenda of the white women’s movement. But to suggest that activists succeeded in partially realizing the ideal of sisterhood in the 1970s is not to argue that all women identified with or were heard within the women’s movement, nor is it to imply that feminist politics came close to resolving the issues associated with caring or with women’s work. Rather, it is to attend to the enormous excitement that many experienced when they came into contact with women’s groups for the first time and to account for the lasting friendships which transformed the lives of many of those both black and white who participated.80 CONCLUSION From the outset of the WLM, British activists sought to expose the labour involved in caring for the home, for men and for dependents. They built upon and extended the contributions of earlier feminists to argue that this work was isolating, repetitive, time-consuming, easily dismissed and a barrier to the realization of women’s true interests and desires. In demanding the recognition of women’s labour, activists highlighted the position of women as caring heads of household and drew attention to their role in negotiating shifting boundaries between public provision for families and the necessity of care for dependents. But, from the beginning, many activists had also wanted to do more. At the same time as feminists criticized the drudgery of caring work and demanded that men take up their fair share of this burden, they also generated and appealed to a positive notion of care, and of carers, as a shared human value. It was this notion of caring as love not as work that activists invoked to build a women’s movement that aspired to unite all women in sisterhood. As I have suggested, to a limited degree the women’s movement indeed became an enactment of its own ambition to enable women to forge new identities and intimacies in a caring community. Both the ongoing affluence of Britain in the 1970s and a sense of looming political and economic crisis were foundational to the forms taken by feminist politics during that decade. Reflecting back on their involvement in the WLM, activists overwhelmingly remember the 1970s as a time of relative prosperity. It seemed easy to find work, to postpone concerns about money and career, and to engage in politics. As Cynthia Cockburn remembers, ‘Money was not scarce, opportunity was not scarce. Right up until the mid-seventies at least, maybe even ’79, there was this feeling that you could freewheel through life …’81 It was also clear to activists, however, that times were changing. Double-digit inflation, rising male unemployment, and the proliferation of women’s paid work were understood by many to be symptomatic of impending crisis. As those who continued to bear primary responsibility for managing household budgets and ensuring that community members were cared for, women were particularly sensitive to the consequences for families of the economic shift. Feminist activists protested against cuts to social services and organized in defence of family allowance even while they highlighted the gendered and racialized assumptions that shaped British social policy and demanded better solutions. They also spoke eloquently about who bore the costs when services or benefits stopped. At the same time, women’s expanding participation in paid work placed greater burdens on their time. It is worth considering the possibility that by the 1980s what has since been described as a late-twentieth-century ‘time bind’ impinged on women’s capacity to participate in politics.82 By 1979, the changing political climate, along with the women’s movement’s partial victories, had begun to produce a realignment of British feminist politics. At the same time as the costs of participating in politics increased for many women, the privatization of caring responsibilities deepened. A decade of feminist analyses of women’s household labour had by then rendered activists highly attuned to the expanding marketization of caring work. As women organized in consciousness-raising groups and addressed questions of work, the gendered division of labour, and everyday experiences of oppression, the private market in caring services, ranging from housekeeping to childcare, came to offer an apparent solution to the challenge of reconciling paid and unpaid work for ever more women.83 Some feminists embraced the expansion of these services, though at times with guilt.84 Many others, however, opposed the deeper entrenchment of market logics into households.85 As the activist Ellen Malos wrote in the Politics of Housework in 1980: Whatever might be gained in terms of a kind of brutal honesty by transforming into market transactions all the work and the caring and loving that take place in the family, even the sexual relationship itself, the result would not even begin to realize the hope for the future embodied in the Women’s Liberation Movement. If sexual relations within marriage are often intrinsically no more than a disguised commercial transaction, removing the disguise cannot lead to freely chosen relationships. And if ‘caring’ for children or other members of the family is often one-sided, unpaid drudgery little will be gained by turning it purely into paid drudgery, either in or outside of the home.86 While the marketization of caring work might provide an immediate solution to the time-bind for some women who could afford it, it could not realize the ultimate vision of a more egalitarian society at the heart of many activists’ feminism. For feminists who remained politically active in the 1980s, the politics of Thatcherism and the expansion of the private market signalled a need to regroup. Elements of what was always a diffuse, varied, and locally rooted movement turned further towards the local scale, becoming more deeply involved in local councils, and neighbourhood childcare and education initiatives. Simultaneously, feminist activists turned outward towards the Labour party and black activism as a way of reconnecting to broader political struggles. The displacement of British feminism in the 1980s was a result both of its triumph and its defeat. As feminist arguments about household labour were reflected in new forms of both community and private care provision, the WLM as an organized movement lost steam. But while Thatcher’s policies could undermine the effort to enact a more equal social division of labour, they could not destroy the bonds of community and identity that remained between activists. Far beyond the 1970s, the ideal of caring community forged in the women’s movement continued to inspire visions of a liberating politics. Sarah Stoller is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project charts the rise of the ‘working parent’ in late twentieth century Britain. By considering how changes in parenthood were linked to broader contemporary shifts in the cultures of work and home, gender relations and economies of time, she aims to explore the mixed legacies of second-wave feminism in the neoliberal era. For their invaluable comments and suggestions at various stages of writing this piece, I would like to thank: Alister Chapman, Lucy Delap, Paula Fass, Katie Harper, David Hayden, Britta Jewell, Simon Prince, Leslie Salzinger, Christina Veatch, James Vernon, Sam Wetherell, Ben Wurgaft and the anonymous readers at History Workshop Journal. I would also like to acknowledge the work of the feminist sociologist Mary McIntosh, whose extensive archive, much used for this article, attests to a lifetime of activism in the feminist and gay and lesbian movements. On McIntosh’s life and work, see obituaries: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/jan/24/mary-mcintosh and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mary-mcintosh-sociologist-writer-and-pioneer-in-the-feminist-and-gay-movements-8505638.html. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 Guiliana Pompei, ‘Wages for Housework’, transl. Joan Wall, Cambridge Women’s Liberation Group, 1972: The Women’s Library, London School of Economics (hereafter TWL@LSE), 7SHR/D/3. Emphasis original. 2 ‘Article for Spare Rib’, 25 May 1977: McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives. 3 Sara Connolly and Mary Gregory, ‘Women and Work since 1970’, in Work and Pay in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell, Oxford, 2007, p. 146. 4 Gerry Holloway, Women and Work in Britain Since 1840, London, 2005, p. 209. 5 Connolly and Gregory, ‘Women and Work since 1970’, pp. 148–72. 6 Holloway, Women and Work, p. 209; Angela Davis, Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, c. 1945–2000, Manchester, 2012, p. 144. 7 Holloway, Women and Work, p. 216; Rosemary Crompton, Women and Work in Modern Britain, Oxford, 1997, p. 84. 8 Crompton, Women and Work, pp. 84–8. 9 The continuities between 1950s and 60s social reform and the feminist movement of the 70s have been underplayed in much of the existing literature on the WLM. On the emergence of the WLM and previous ‘waves’ of feminist activism, see Jane Lewis, ‘From Equality to Liberation: Contextualising the Emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement’, in Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert and John Seed, London, 1992, pp. 96–117. See also Sarah Browne, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland, Manchester, 2014. 10 Consciousness-raising groups first emerged in Britain in 1969 and continued to spring up over the course of the 1970s. On the role of consciousness raising in the British WLM, see Sue Bruley, ‘Consciousness-Raising in Clapham: Women’s Liberation as “Lived Experience” in South London in the 1970s’, Women’s History Review 22: 5, 2013, pp. 717–38; David Bouchier, The Feminist Challenge: the Movement for Women’s Liberation in Britain and the USA, London, 1984; Anna E. Rogers, ‘Feminist Consciousness-raising in the 1970s and 1980s: West Yorkshire Women’s Groups and their Impact on Women’s Lives’, unpublished dissertation, University of Leeds, 2010. 11 Historians have tended to emphasize the origins of the WLM in university and New Left milieux and in the labour movement of the late sixties. While these contexts were critical to the intellectual and political trajectory of the women’s movement, activists were also politicized by the experience of motherhood and family life in the shifting political-economic context of the 1970s. Some made their way to the WLM through more traditional women’s organizations such as the National Housewives Register and the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now Gingerbread). For discussions of the diverse bases of women’s politicization, see Ann Oakley interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 11 May 2012: Sisterhood and After: the Women’s Liberation Oral History Project, British Library Sound Archive (henceforth SAA); Sheila Rowbotham interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 22 Nov. and 7 Dec. 2010: SAA; Ellen Malos interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 24 and 25 Oct. 2010: SAA. 12 On the domestic labour debate, see Lise Vogel, Woman Questions: Essays for a Materialist Feminism, London, 1995, p. 57; Maxine Molyneux, ‘Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate’, New Left Review 116, July–August 1979, pp. 3–27. 13 Oral histories with feminist activists collected in the Sisterhood and After project touch on questions of childrearing, organizing, the division of labour, and occasionally reactions to the campaign for Wages for Housework. They do not, however, deal extensively with political debates over caring work within the women’s movement. In their reflections on the WLM, activists have emphasized the transformative effects of feminism on their lives personally and intellectually over what were in the 1970s intensely fought debates about strategy and policy. 14 Bouchier, Feminist Challenge; Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: the Struggle for Women’s Liberation, London, 1987; Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999, New York, 2000. 15 Bouchier, Feminist Challenge, p. 122; Coote and Campbell, Sweet Freedom, pp.18–19, 88; Elizabeth Meehan, ‘British Feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s’, in British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Harold L. Smith, Amherst, 1990, pp. 189–203. On theoretical divisions, see also Maggie Humm, Dictionary of Feminist Theory (1990), 2nd edn, New York, 1995; Paul Byrne, ‘The Politics of the Women’s Movement’, in Women in Politics, ed. Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris, Oxford, 1996. 16 See in particular: Browne, Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland; Bruley, ‘Consciousness-Raising in Clapham’; Lucy Delap, ‘Feminist Bookshops, Reading Cultures and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Great Britain, c. 1974–2000’, History Workshop Journal 81: 1, 2016, pp. 171–96; Eve Setch, ‘The Face of Metropolitan Feminism: the London Women’s Liberation Workshop, 1969–1979’, Twentieth Century British History 13: 2, 2002, pp. 171–90; Jeska Rees, ‘A Look Back at Anger: the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1978’, Women’s History Review 19: 3, 2010, pp. 337–56; Natalie Thomlinson, ‘The Colour of Feminism: White Feminists and ‘Race’ in the Women’s Liberation Movement, History 97: 327, 2012, pp. 453–75. 17 Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence, ‘The women’s movement has no central organization’, 1975: McIntosh 3/1/3, LSE Archives. 18 Nottingham W.L. Theory Group, ‘Marked “private” ’, 21 Sept. 1974: McIntosh 1/10, LSE Archives. 19 ‘No socialist revolution without Women’s liberation’, 1972: 5WWR/A/01, TWL@LSE. 20 On the theoretical dimensions of WFH, see Maud Ann Bracke, ‘Between the Transnational and the Local: Mapping the Trajectories and Contexts of the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1970s Italian Feminism’, Women’s History Review 22: 4, 2013, pp. 625–42. 21 Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, Bristol, 1975, p. 2. 22 Power of Women Collective and Padua Wages for Housework Committee, ‘The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community [1973]: Foreword to the 3rd edition’, 1975. Reprinted in Sex, Race and Class, the Perspective of Winning: a Selection of Writings 1952–2011, ed. Selma James, Oakland, 2012, pp. 45–6. 23 For many activists, WFH’s strong stance was generative of a deeper engagement with the question of household work. See Ellen Malos interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA; Mary McIntosh interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 11 and 12 Jan. 2011: SAA. For others, learning about WFH constituted their first introduction to the politics of the division of labour: Mukami McCrum interviewed by Freya Johnson-Ross, 8 and 9 Dec. 2012: SAA. 24 H. Colombe, ‘Wages for Housework and Women on Their Own’, 1973: McIntosh 1/6, LSE Archives. A similar analysis appears in the Subgroup of the Political Economy of Women Study Group for the Women and Socialism Workshop, ‘Women, the State, and Reproduction since the 1930s’, 7 June 1975: McIntosh 3/1/3, LSE Archives. 25 Esther Ronay, ‘All Women are Housewives’, July 1973: McIntosh 1/6, LSE Archives. 26 Wages due Lesbians, ‘Lesbian Autonomy and the Gay Movement’: HCA Ephemera/ 315, LSE Archives. 27 Jill Nicholls, ‘Daffodils, Cards, and Wages’, Spare Rib, May 1977, p. 28. The Heart of the Race similarly describes service work as ‘little more than institutionalized housework’: Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, London, 1985, p. 25. 28 Clare Cherrington, ‘Are you a typewriter?’, Spare Rib, April 1978, p. 8. 29 Wages due Lesbians, ‘Lesbian Autonomy and the Gay Movement’. The theme of sexual intimacy as unpaid labour features prominently in feminist art in which holding and kissing men is figured as a stage of the workday. See, for instance, ‘Capitalism also depends on domestic labour’ and ‘My wife doesn’t work’ (figs 1 and 2 above): 5WRR/C/02, TWL@LSE. For the workshop and its production see, https://seeredwomensworkshop.wordpress.com/, and See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974–1990, intro. Sheila Rowbotham, Four Corners exhibition catalogue, London 2016., 30 See, for instance Dave, ‘Men’s Involvement in Childcare’, 1975: 7SHR/E/01, WL, LSE; ‘Men Against Sexism … or the Pig’s Last Grunt’, spring 1975: 7SHR/E/04, TWL@LSE. See also Lucy Delap, ‘Uneasy Solidarity: the British Men’s Movement and Feminism’, in Women’s Liberation Movements in European Perspective, ed. Kristina Schultz, forthcoming. 31 See, for instance, ‘Discussion kit – the women’s liberation campaign for financial and legal independence’, (undated, but very likely 1976 or 77): McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives; ‘Central London Socialist Worker Education Meetings’, undated: 7SHR/D/3, TWL@LSE; ‘What’s on at the London’, (piece about the London Hospital), in Women in the East End, c. 1977: SHWA/2, WL, LSE; ‘Increase Family Allowance Now!’, July 1976: HCA Ephemera/ 315, LSE Archives; Sue Fawcus, ‘Abortion and the Cuts’, in No Turning Back: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement 1975–80, ed. Feminist Anthology Collective, London, 1981, pp.42–45 (first published in Abortion: Our Struggle for Control, National Abortion Campaign Pamphlet, 1980). 32 ‘What’s on at the London’. 33 For a discussion of the tension between feminist demands on and criticisms of the state, see Sheila Rowbotham interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA; Cynthia Cockburn interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 13 and 14 Jan. 2012: SAA. 34 Elizabeth Armstrong remembers discussions of collective childcare and end-of-life care in the Scottish women’s movement. See Elizabeth Armstrong interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 11 Oct. 2011: SAA. 35 Jane Loggart, ‘Working Women’s Charter Campaign London Newsletter No. 3’, 1 Oct. 1975: McIntosh 3/7, LSE Archives. See also Heart of the Race, pp. 29–33. 36 ‘The Demand for Independence’, April 1978: McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives. Since the 1970s, activists have continued to criticize the privatization of care. See for instance, Susie Orbach interviewed by Polly Russell, 6 and 10 June, 4 July, 15 Aug., 5 Oct., and 29 Nov. 2011: SAA. 37 ‘The Demand for Independence’. See also ‘Women, the State, and Reproduction since the 1930s’; York, Hull, Leeds, and Durham Groups, ‘The Family’, October 1972: 5WWR/A/01, TWL@LSE; ‘Summary of the Demands’, 22–3 Sept. 1973, Women’s Liberation and Socialism Conference, London: McIntosh 1/8, LSE Archives. Rosalind Delmar remembers a feminist response to Bowlby at the first WLM conference at Ruskin College in 1970: Rosalind Delmar interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 15 and 17 Sept., 1 Oct. 2010: SAA. On Bowlbyism and mid-century psychology, see Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: the Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement, Oxford, 2013. 38 ‘The Demand for Independence’. 39 See Heart of the Race, p. 105; OWAAD, ‘Black Women and Health’, in No Turning Back: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement 1975–80, ed. Feminist Anthology Collective, London, 1981, pp.145–9. First published in ‘Black Women in Britain Speak Out’, March 1979. There was also however support for this position among white feminists. See, for instance: ‘Marked “private”.’ 40 ‘WFH Press Release’, undated flyer: 5WRR/C/02, TWL@LSE; Heart of the Race, pp. 89–123. 41 ‘Increase Family Allowance Now!’, emphasis original. 42 ‘Nurses in Revolt’, Women’s Report, May–June 1974: McIntosh 3/7, LSE Archives. On nursing and caring work, see also Jeanette Mitchell, ‘NHS cuts, women bleed’, Spare Rib, 1984, p. 17; Heart of the Race, pp. 45–6. 43 See for instance ‘Article for Spare Rib’; ‘Review of the Supplementary Benefits Board from the National Federation of Claimants Unions’: McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives; ‘Guaranteed Independent Income for All Women’, Socialist-Feminist National Conference, Manchester, January 1978: McIntosh 3/1/2, LSE Archives; ‘The Independence Demand’: McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives; Zoe Fairbanks, ‘A Living Income in Their Own Right for Women or Men Who Care for Dependents at Home’, in No Turning Back: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement 1975–80, ed. Feminist Anthology Collective, London, 1981, pp. 7–10. First published in Women Speaking, July–September 1976. 44 ‘For Saturday night open session: new questions raised in organising this conference’, September 1973: 5WWR/A/01, TWL@LSE. 45 Catherine Hall interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 16 April 2012: SAA. 46 Catherine Hall in Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation, ed. Michelene Wandor, London, 1990, p. 177. Also cited in Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain, Oxford, 2013, p. 248. 47 Caroline Freeman, ‘Notes to Socialists on Wages for Housework’: McIntosh 1/6, LSE Archives. Caroline Freeman (now New) recounts having experienced hostility within the women’s movement as a young married mother. Division over questions of care for dependents may to an extent have mapped onto a divide between women with and without children. Black activists who demanded that women be permitted to care for their children also felt marginalized within the women’s movement. 48 Freeman, ‘Notes to Socialists on Wages for Housework’. 49 See, for example: ‘Article for Spare Rib’; ‘Women, the State, and Reproduction since the 1930s’; ‘Marked “private”’; ‘The Demand for Independence’, November 1975: McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives; ‘The Demand for Independence’, April 1978: McIntosh 3/1/1, LSE Archives; ‘Some Facts About Women’s Lives’: McIntosh 3/1/3, LSE Archives; Ann Foreman and Linda Simon, ‘Wages for Housework – what is it based upon, and what are its implications’, 22 Sept. 1973, Women’s Liberation and Socialism Conference: McIntosh 1/8, LSE Archives. In the 1970s and beyond, countless groups organized neighbourhood crèches and developed creative childcare arrangements that sought to distribute caring responsibilities in new ways. For a discussion of some of these, see Catherine Hall interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 16 April 2012: SAA; Elizabeth Armstrong, interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA; Lynne Segal interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 23 Aug. 2011: SAA; Jan McKenley interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 18 and 19 April 2011: SAA; Sheila Rowbotham interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA. 50 Elizabeth Armstrong interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA. 51 ‘WFH Press Release’. See also Heart of the Race, p. 116. 52 Dora Russell, ‘Introduction’, The Tamarisk Tree: McIntosh 3/1/3, LSE Archives. The document in Mary’s papers is a two-page Xerox signed by hand – the only additional information reads ‘In defence of children’, under the Tamarisk Tree. That is the title of a much earlier book of hers. 53 Cherrington, ‘Are you a typewriter?’, pp. 6–9. 54 ‘Helen’, ‘Why I want Wages for Housework’: McIntosh 1/6, LSE Archives. 55 Federici, Wages Against Housework, pp. 5–6. 56 Ann Oakley interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA. On the isolation and frustrations of motherhood, see also Catherine Hall interviewed by Rachel Cohen: SAA. 57 See, for instance: Heart of the Race, pp. 31–2; ‘Women, the State, and Reproduction since the 1930s’; ‘Why I Want Wages for Housework’; ‘Article for Spare Rib’; Linda Peffer, ‘International Socialist Resolutions for Conference’, May 1975: 7SHR/B/12, TWL@LSE. Many of the student questionnaires collected in Mary McIntosh’s ‘Women in Society’ course also touch on these themes. See ‘Women in Society’: 5WWR/A/01-02, LSE Archives. 58 York, Hull, Leeds, and Durham Groups, ‘The Family’. 59 Beatrix Campbell and Valerie Charlton, ‘Work to Rule’, in No Turning Back: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement 1975–80, ed. Feminist Anthology Collective, pp. 110–20. First published in Red Rag, 14 Nov. 1978. 60 ‘Tuesday 7th October’: 5WWR/A/02, TWL@LSE. 61 Denise, ‘A Woman’s Day’, in Sweeping Statements: Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement 1981–83, ed. Hannah Kanter, Sarah Lefanu, Shaila Shah and Carole Spedding, London, 1984, pp. 52–3. First published in Merseyside Women’s Paper, spring 1982. 62 Mariosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Women and the Subversion of the Community, Brooklyn, p. 35. First published in 1971. 63 Federici, Wages Against Housework, p. 6. 64 Supporters of a guaranteed minimum income were similarly adamant about freeing women from work obligations. See ‘Article for Spare Rib’; ‘Review of the Supplementary Benefits System’; ‘Guaranteed Independent Income for All Women’. 65 On the structure and organization of the women’s liberation movement, see Pugh, p. 320; Setch. 66 Delap, pp. 171–196. 67 See, for instance: ‘Why I want Wages for Housework’. Beatrix Campbell and Valerie Charlton address the issue on a more abstract level, contrasting the world of work to one that ‘allows time for children, leisure, politics’: Campbell and Charlton, ‘Work to Rule’, p. 110. 68 Countless interviews from the Sisterhood and After project testify to the extent to which feminism prompted a shake-up of activists’ intimate relationships. See, for instance Cynthia Cockburn interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA; Anna Davin interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 9 Aug., 28 Sept. 2010: SAA; Gail Lewis interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 15 and 18 April 2011: SAA. 69 The women’s movement began to emerge in the US in 1966, slightly earlier than in Britain and Western Europe, where it followed on the heels of the student protests of 1968. Historians have largely attributed this distinction to the earlier politicization of young American women through the US civil-rights movement. On feminism in the US context, see Bouchier, Feminist Challenge; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, New York, 2006; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: the Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, New York, 1980. 70 Pat Mainardi, ‘The Politics of Housework’, in The Politics of Housework, ed. Ellen Malos, Cheltenham, 1980, p. 85. 71 See for instance Anna Davin interviewed by Rachel Cohen: SAA. 72 Jill Radford, ‘History of Women’s Liberation Movements in Britain: a Reflective Personal History’, in Stirring It: Challenges for Feminism, ed. Gabriele Griffin, Sasha Roseneil, Marianne Hester and Shirin Rai, London, 1994, p. 49. 73 Cynthia Cockburn interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA. 74 See for example Rosalind Delmar interviewed by Rachel Cohen: SAA. 75 Beatrix Campbell interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 6 and 7 Sept. 2010: SAA. 76 The deep and enduring nature of friendships between activists is a central theme of oral history testimony. See, for example: Ann Oakley interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA; Catherine Hall interviewed by Rachel Cohen: SAA; Stella Dadzie interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 2 and 3 June 2011: SAA; Susie Orbach interviewed by Polly Russell: SAA. 77 Barbara Taylor interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 5 and 16 Dec. 2011: SAA. Taylor and Alexander went on to teach a course together on the history of female friendship. 78 Lynne Segal interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA. 79 Mukami McCrum interviewed by Freya Johnson-Ross: SAA. 80 On the exhilaration of consciousness-raising, see Bruley, ‘Consciousness-Raising in Clapham’. 81 Cynthia Cockburn interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA. See also Rosalind Delmar interviewed by Rachel Cohen: SAA. 82 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, New York, 1997. 83 While historians have yet to chart the expansion of the private market in childcare and housekeeping in the 70s and 80s, sociologists have explored growing middle-class reliance on these services. See in particular Nicky Gregson and Michelle Lowe, Servicing the Middle Classes: Class, Gender, and Waged Domestic Labour in Contemporary Britain, London, 1994. 84 See for example Jenni Murray interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 12 March 2012: SAA; Rowena Arshad interviewed by Rachel Cohen, 15 June 2011: SAA. 85 Jan McKenley and Zoe Fairbanks both discuss their discomfort with paying other women to clean their homes. See Jan McKenley interviewed by Margaretta Jolly: SAA; Zoe Fairbanks interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, 23 and 24 June 2011: SAA. 86 Malos, Politics of Housework, p. 31. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Turner, Thomas

doi: 10.1093/hwj/dby008pmid: N/A

We live in a world of recorded music. Even when we do not actively seek them, popular recordings provide a soundtrack to the most mundane of everyday activities. Musics recorded miles and years apart rub up against one another, while long dead performers and musical styles enjoy a strange afterlife. It is possible to browse a trove of music spanning decades and continents, bringing together styles and artists that could rarely, if ever, have combined in the real world. Much of this music can be traced to marginalized and marginal communities. Whether it is hip hop, grime, rock'n’ roll, disco, EDM, reggae, or ‘world’ music, the sounds we hear most frequently are not those associated with the supposedly high art of classical composition. Instead, musics rooted in everyday working-class experience provide an aural backdrop to much of modern life. In Noise Uprising, Michael Denning seeks to expose the origins of our musical world. The current soundscape took shape, he argues, between 1925 and 1930, when engineers and executives from western record companies embarked on a speculative recording frenzy, travelling the globe in search of performers whose music could be pressed onto 78rpm shellac discs to be exported and resold to local consumers. This recording boom was bookended by the development of the electrical microphone and loudspeaker in the early 1920s and the Wall Street Crash in 1929, when many recording companies collapsed. In this brief window, a wealth of music was committed to discs that circulated the world with far-reaching consequences. Among the styles to emerge were jazz, son, tango, samba, tarab, marabi, hula and kroncong. These had shared characteristics but were the product of local traditions and the circulation of musics and people through colonial shipping routes. Although it was driven by commercial impulses and technical innovation, Denning argues that the 1920s recording boom – and the originality of the music it captured – caused a fundamental remaking of the world of music, a transformative revolution that can still be felt today. As Denning shows, western record companies eager to cater to colonial consumers would record almost anything they thought might find buyers in local markets. Many of their recording sessions therefore took place in what Denning describes as a global archipelago of colonial ports, which were, he suggests, incubators of new and vibrant musical cultures. Between 1910 and 1930, millions of working-class migrants thronged into ramshackle, cosmopolitan portside environments. Disparate and established musical traditions were thrown together, resulting in new forms of cultural expression. In New Orleans, Havana, Lagos, Honolulu, Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Shanghai and other locations, the sounds of rural immigrants mixed with those of classically-trained musicians or the hymns of Christian missionaries. Traditional artisan-made instruments rang out alongside the steel-stringed guitars, accordions and brass instruments produced in American and European factories. The musical traditions of seaborne immigrants mixed with those of local musicians. Focusing on three transnational arcs marked by diaspora peoples – the African Atlantic, the gypsy Mediterranean, and the Polynesian Pacific – Denning argues that ports were sites of cross-cultural exchange and fertilization, melting pots in which new styles and approaches to music were born. It was these emerging musical fusions that were discovered and recorded by travelling engineers. Port environments were attractive to the record companies because they provided an easy source of raw material. In the traditional musical centres of London, New York, Paris and Berlin classically trained musicians had already organized into unions and taken a stand against recorded or ‘canned’ music. In port cities, by contrast, engineers could set up shop in local hotels, record obliging local musicians, and then, taking advantage of the easy transport links provided by steam ships, return home or move on to other recording locations. The sounds they captured would be pressed onto 78rpm shellac discs and in this form exported back to the localities from which they came. As Denning notes, millions of discs flooded out of pressing plants in Britain, the United States, France and Germany destined for global markets. This may have been a capitalist colonial enterprise, but Denning argues it had a profound cultural impact. In their rush to record, western record companies legitimized and spread what Denning calls vernacular music. The terminology is important. This was not the folk music of rural peasantry nor the high traditions of classical music. Rather, it was the modern, urban, polyglot sounds of the colonial port, music belonging to everyday life, made and listened to by ordinary people. Although they were driven by commercial impulses, western record companies gave voice to an emerging modernity, to forms of musical expression that were overlooked, ignored, or condemned by the social establishment. As Denning points out, the recording and circulation of this music was a radical move that challenged existing musical hierarchies, a shift he compares to the invention of the printing press and the support it gave to vernacular languages over classical Latin. Denning describes the shifts toward recorded and vernacular music as ‘twin Copernican revolutions’ in the world of music. His analysis of their impact is compelling. Pressed into the grooves of 78rpm discs, music travelled far more easily than did its performers. The result was a phonograph culture in which recordings were not bound by time or place: the beginning of what we experience today. As Denning argues, a world musical space developed in which a new relation between sound and space, music and territory was forged. It was here that Jimmie Rodgers’s yodel could become popular on the west coast of Africa, or the Hawaiian slide guitar integral to American country music. More prosaically, as working-class access to phonograph machines increased, recorded music became the background to everyday life. When not confined to live performance at special occasions, music escaped social and cultural boundaries to become a principal form of entertainment. Perhaps most significantly, these recordings transformed how music was made, heard, and exchanged. Music circulated more freely, songs and styles could be learnt from records, and recording became part of musical life. The record itself emerged as a distinct entity, with orchestrations and timings developed to fit its limitations. At the same time, the clashing timbres, the rhythmic beat embodied by the ‘rhythm section’, the ‘weird’ harmonies and improvised performances that characterized these recordings challenged existing conceptions of music and laid the foundations for much of the popular music we enjoy today. Ample evidence, notably Theodor Adorno’s revulsion at modern dance music, of how shocking these records sounded to some contemporaries is provided. Yet as Denning suggests, it is difficult now to hear these recordings as they were heard by their earliest critics: ‘our ears are the product of the very success of these recorded vernacular musics over the last hundred years’. The influence of the recording boom of the 1920s was not confined to the world of music. As Denning notes, it coincided with the first stirrings of anticolonial activism, and it is here, in his elision of music and politics, that he makes his boldest claims. In his analysis, the vernacular records of the 1920s were heralds of the process of decolonization, part of a cultural revolution that made possible the subsequent political revolutions and the emergence of at least a hundred new nations in the second half of the twentieth century. Decolonization was built, he argues, on the ‘decolonization of the ear’. He is careful to note that this was not a uniform process, and he emphasizes the variety of ways in which music was used by activists and enmeshed with anticolonial struggles. Equally, he acknowledges that these musics were themselves products of colonial enterprise. Yet despite the various and numerous trajectories described, he is emphatic about the political power of music: even when an overtly political message was not conveyed, he argues, the disruptive noise of vernacular music gave voice to marginalized peoples and in so doing challenged colonial ideals. This is a reading rooted in the cultural studies of the Birmingham School and the belief that cultural forms can constitute sites of opposition and resistance. It is an analysis that can, of course, be questioned. Is this what performers intended? Is this how listeners heard and interpreted these sounds? More empirically minded readers may want concrete evidence. Moreover, the sheer variety of anticolonial endeavour described makes one wonder whether this really was, as Denning claims, part of a global pattern, and his claim that these musics were a ‘guerrilla insurgency’ is perhaps a little hyperbolic. Nevertheless, as a call for music to be treated as the subject of serious study, and for it to be understood as a medium through which oppositional politics could be constituted and conveyed, the book is clear. As Denning points out, music and sound are fundamental to social and political analysis. The global scope of this book is impressive and Denning’s arguments, about both the impact of recording and the political and cultural significance of music, make for compelling reading. Yet when taken together as a book, Noise Uprising struggles to cohere. The transnational, cross-genre perspective provides new interpretation and insight into a wealth of material, but Denning skips quickly from one artist, genre, or national context to the next, often combining several into a single sentence. Dozens of musicians and styles spanning five continents are brought into the mix, and at points extensive lists of artists, protagonists or phenomena, threaten to overwhelm the reader. The effect can be confusing, and one wonders whether each example is as closely connected as Denning suggests. (This breadth also leads to a profusion of sentences with the formulations ‘if … then …’, ‘not only … but also …’, and ‘from … to …’ that ought to have been highlighted by Verso’s copyeditors.) Moreover, the scope of the book itself is fuzzy. Much of the analysis focuses on the arcs of the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean, yet cases from further afield crop up in support of individual points. How American country artists like the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers relate to the broader arguments about the ‘polyphony of colonial ports’ is never quite made clear. If anything, their inclusion indicates how far and widely the recording revolution reached. With the abundant diversity of material being considered, there is a nagging sense that the evidence has been carefully selected and made to fit the argument rather than the other way around. Given the richness of its subject, the book is also oddly lacking in colour. The opening chapter provides a series of vignettes of the performers and recording sessions that gave birth to this new musical culture, but thereafter the glimpses of those involved are fleeting. As Denning notes, however, the only traces left by many of them are the names inscribed on shellac discs, and so it is perhaps unfair to criticize on these grounds. More relevantly, and as already stated, this is a cultural-studies text that seeks to provide an analysis of musical styles and events. It seeks less to uncover or tell the stories of those involved in great detail than it does to create an ambitious map of the connections between them, and an overarching evaluation of their musical, cultural, and political significance. Denning brings together and builds on an impressive range of existing historical scholarship about each of these vernacular musics, drawing global parallels and comparisons that would not be possible in more localized studies. The loss of detail – and the attendant grit – is possibly an inevitable consequence of the book’s broad scope. That said, it is still a shame not to learn more about the subaltern worlds from which much of this music emerged; for that, one should turn to the scholars listed in Denning’s notes. Fortunately, however, Denning does provide a Spotify playlist of the recordings discussed. It is here that the book really comes alive. Listening to the collected tracks while reading along, it becomes possible to evaluate Denning’s claims more closely and to hear the sounds he describes. The reader-listener can better assess Denning’s conclusions: can these musical styles really be considered similar? That much of the music sounds startlingly contemporary or familiar underlines Denning’s point that this was when our modern musical vocabulary was formed. Many of these musical styles, once so radical, are now so commonplace and canonical that they sound almost like parodies of themselves. This is a bold and engaging book that offers an ambitious analysis of the music recorded at the beginning of the twentieth century. Denning offers a convincing description of the transformative power of recording and the mass circulation of recorded music, and sheds light on the conditions out of which the vernacular music of the 1920s emerged. By combining history with musicology and cultural studies, Noise Uprising forces us to consider how music and sound can be used to gain greater insight into societies and cultures, and how music can be incorporated into social and political analysis. Even if some of the arguments can be contested, it contains valuable insights into the political power of popular music that should inform future scholarship. Historians should take note of Denning’s assertion that the stuff of mass culture is worthy of serious contemplation. The book succeeds in highlighting the birth of modern musical idioms. Through the inclusion of a digitally streamed playlist and a hint that it will be relocated as ‘vehicles of online music change’, it shows too that the world of popular music exists in a state of constant flux, and that that how we consume and engage with recordings continues to shift. Thomas Turner ([email protected]) studied at Oxford and Birkbeck before receiving his PhD in History from Birkbeck, University of London, in 2013. He currently teaches History and Cultural Studies in London and has published work on the histories of music and clothing. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)