20 Century British History

Given on the centenary of women's suffrage, this lecture explores the tensions and conflicts the claim for the vote raised among elite women already enmeshed in parliamentary and political circles. Drawing on the unbuttoned and sometimes angry correspondence among A.J. Balfour's suffragist sisters-in-law Lady Frances Balfour and Lady Betty Balfour, Frances' collaborator (and suffragist leader) Millicent Fawcett, Lady Betty's militant suffragette sister Lady Constance Lytton, and their old friend (and wife of the anti-suffragist Prime Minister) Margot Asquith, it explores the appeal but also the costs of this democratic claim for such "incorporated" women - and explains why some nevertheless supported it...

This article is a history of the privatization of British Telecom. BT's privatization occupies a central position in histories of Thatcherism as a pivotal moment in Thatcherism's ideological focus on popular capitalism. These histories, however, overlook the important intersection of financial institutions and information technology policy in shaping BT's privatization. Financial institutions in the City of London formed a lobbying group, the City Telecommunications Committee, that pressured for BT's privatization and secured preferential treatment for the City from BT, ending a decades-long policy of uniform telecommunications services across Britain...

This article identifies the environmental components of the limits of industrial nationalization between 1945 and 1956, and with it the spatial dimensions of state power, through a case study of wind power experiments on the Orkney islands. Technocratic and socialist principles drove efforts to supply electricity to all corners of the nation, but material and environmental factors limited success, especially in remote regions. The article considers the materiality of islandness and its effects on the application of national-scale energy policy and emergence of 'alternative' energy solutions, in light of James C...

In the 1980s, Labour struggled to respond to a hostile political context during a protracted period of opposition. Diverse figures claimed that the Left was suffering from a structural decline in a supposed 'traditional working class' voting base: contentions which only became more influential after the 1983 electoral catastrophe. Competing solutions were proffered-including building a 'rainbow alliance' informed by equalities politics, or appealing to a southern 'new working class'. The latter interpretation gained greater influence on Neil Kinnock's leadership...

At the beginning of the 1970s, relations between the historic British churches and the new black-led churches were usually non-existent or marked by prejudices or ambivalences. This article examines the emergence, development, and significance of a cross-cultural ecumenical dialogue sponsored by the British Council of Churches. It places this in a context of both growing white liberal interest in the 'multi-racial' society and the increasing public assertiveness of collective black Christian consciousness. In doing so, it contributes to our understandings of religious change in the twentieth century: both in terms of perceptions of 'secularization' and the complex relationship between Christianity and race relations in the decades after Windrush...

From the late 1950s, Conservative research and policy thinkers underwent a conscious intellectual adjustment, which had profound implications for how the party conceived the relationship between politicians and the public during Edward Heath's period as Conservative leader after 1965. In response to contemporaneous debates regarding 'modernization', and as a result of their engagement with the emergent social sciences, a new generation of Conservatives tended to repudiate the party's traditional preference for idealist and organicist philosophical assumptions in favour of a rationalistic approach to political administration...

This article explores the 1970 case of Broome v. Cassell & Co. in which an elderly wartime naval officer was awarded unprecedented damages for defamation in David Irving's account of the sinking of wartime Allied convoy PQ17 in 1942. The article examines the discourses and images deployed in this landmark British libel action, as a means of analysing how cultural memories of convoy PQ17 and the wartime Royal Navy were shaped and transmitted in post-war Britain. It is argued here that the trial offers a prism through which to explore wider anxieties that the generation who fought the Second World War held during the late 1960s...

In the 1980s, prostitution resurfaced as the object of feminist politics as second-wave activists grappled with Thatcherism, prostitute rights, tenant activism, anti-violence movements, and changes in the street sex trade and in policing. These conflicting imperatives converged on King's Cross, London. Events in King's Cross highlight some general trends, especially shifts in policing and in the geographic dispersal of the street sex trade. King's Cross also possessed singular features. It was the epicentre of street prostitution in London and the destination for hundreds of northern women migrating to the metropolis to sell sex...

This article uses the audio recordings of sexual counselling sessions carried out by Dr Joan Malleson, a birth control activist and committed family planning doctor in the early 1950s, which are held at the Wellcome Library in London as a case study to explore the ways Malleson and the patients mobilised emotions for respectively managing sexual problems and expressing what they understood as constituting a 'good sexuality' in postwar Britain. The article contains two interrelated arguments. First, it argues that Malleson used a psychological framework to inform her clinical work...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Selling small wares, novelties, and affordable luxuries manufactured from artificial silk, the South Asian door-to-door pedlar or 'travelling draper', and his compatriot the 'Indian toffee man', were once fairly commonplace figures in British working-class life and the object of fond childhood recollections for many. Unfortunately, they have now largely drifted from popular memory, having left little trace in the historical record. However, this article's reconstruction of their lives offers a new perspective on the pivotal role inter-racial social networks played in pioneering South Asian immigration, settlement, and trade in Britain...

The Leadmill, a cooperative arts centre and nightclub in Sheffield, opened in 1980. The venue sought to provide an accessible leisure space for the economically and socially marginalized, and received funding for this from Sheffield City Council. Focusing on the cultural policies of the new urban left Labour Council in Sheffield during the 1980s, this article explores the relationship between Sheffield City Council and the Leadmill. It builds on recent scholarship on the 1980s that has sought to look beyond Thatcherism as an explanation for the decade, and sheds light on the everyday experiences of living through this period...

Due to the difficult methodological issues it presents, political historians are wary of using television - the most important mass medium of the later twentieth century - as a means of exploring vernacular political thinking. Attempting to show how television audiences were encouraged to think politically, the article outlines a method generated through an engagement with the work of disciplines beyond history, to help political historians more systematically assess the medium's popular impact. The article takes as its case study Britain during the 1970s, one of the most ideologically contested periods in the country's history...

This article explores working-class women's experiences of political activism in the Labour Party in the 1930s. The article focuses upon the relationships formed with leaders, the bonds with fellow women, and the emotional fulfilment politics could bring, rather than considering the policies and campaigns which drew women into the party. It suggests how working-class women performed a political self which was shaped by but distinctive from a domestic self. Official political party materials from across Britain are drawn upon to uncover how working-class women in the years after equal franchise was won carved out a political space and the meanings of activism...

The growth of occupational pensions in the post-war era transformed the pattern of capital ownership in Britain, as workers' collective retirement savings purchased a substantial share of the national economy. This article examines the response of the Labour and Conservative parties to this significant material change, and considers how it shaped their respective politics of ownership at the end of the post-war settlement. It demonstrates that Labour and the trade union movement recognized occupational pension funds as a new form of social ownership but had to reconcile their desire to give pension scheme-members direct control over their investments with a broader belief that the funds needed be used for a state-coordinated revitalization of the industrial economy...

In 1977, the John Lewis Partnership (JLP) was blacklisted for breaching the Labour government's pay controls under the Social Contract. As the Callaghan administration struggled to establish economic credibility, extending its reach into the private sector emerged as a political priority. JLP became a test case of government resolve months before the Ford strike of autumn 1978 that ushered in the Winter of Discontent. This article uses JLP records to create a more nuanced picture of the tensions, contestations, and vacillations of pay policy in the late 1970s...

First aid was the focus of growing voluntary activity in the post-war decades. Despite the advent of the National Health Service in 1948, increased numbers of people volunteered to learn, teach, and administer first aid as concern about health and safety infiltrated new activities and arenas. In this article we use the example of the Voluntary Aid Societies (VAS, focusing in particular on St John Ambulance) to highlight continuities and change in the relationship between state and voluntary sector in health and welfare provision during the four decades after 1945...

Four free pop festivals, held in Windsor and Watchfield in 1972-75, attracted significant public attention. This article discusses the aims and ideals of the festivalgoers, the confused reactions of the authorities, the ambivalence of the Anglican Church and the hostility of some conservative groups. We argue that the free festivals mark an important stage in the constitution of the counterculture and that they created a model which later pop festivals (in particular Glastonbury) attempt to emulate. We show that themes relating to a revival of the pilgrimage experience became important markers of this new type of event, shifting the emphasis from political protest to a memorialized and performative activism...

Harold Wilson's resignation honours list of 1976 was almost universally condemned by politicians, civil servants, and the press because it contained a number of high honours to individuals who were seen as scandalously lacking in merit. Unknown officials leaked details to the press and used multiple internal mechanisms, including the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee, to try to block the list, but Wilson pushed it through. This article examines the controversy around the list in terms of how the various parties involved used ideas about scandal, honour, and merit to discredit Wilson, his secretary Marcia Falkender and the honours nominees...