Preliminary Programme

This paper shows how an intensive contextual and textual reading of a single life-narrative can produce a rich picture of class relations in England c.1900, and their impact on individual working-class subjectivity; and how a hypertext framing can open pedagogic pathways to relevant historical, textual (including aural and visual) and historiographical resources.

Stratford-upon-Avon c.1900 was a local market town, and growing tourist centre (with the emergence of the Shakespeare industry), situated in an agricultural region suffering from depression. With little industry, it was still strongly paternalist. Mostly Conservative in national elections, locally it saw occasional, populist/Conservative, riots. George Hewins (1879-1977), born into the lower working class, worked as a labourer, bringing up a large family. His memories were recorded in his mid 90s.

Contextually, his life-narrative is structured around themes of:

work (Hewins left school at 11; after a broken apprenticeship, he mixed periods of skilled brick-laying with low-paid, mostly casual, labouring jobs which kept him at the bottom of the class hierarchy. His narrative evaluates the local middle / lower-middle business class primarily as good or bad employers. Central to the class situation of his lower-working-class family, neighbours and friends were the basic needs for housing and food, and hence money to secure them).

the geography of Stratford (focussed through the symbolic contrast of two of the largest buildings within the Stratford townscape – the Workhouse and the Playhouse [Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, opened 1879, the year of Hewins's birth]; & the relation of the town to the surrounding countryside)

class relations (Stratford's relatively small elite and the local professional upper-middle class, who were bound together by a common educational history [all attended elite private schools and the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge], support for the part-time Army Volunteers, and membership of the Freemasons;, had a direct and personal impact on Hewins's life)

imperialism (the elite were keen supporters of the British Empire, whose practical involvement in its military dimension was supplemented ideologically by the work of the Theatre which they supported; Hewins joined a Volunteer battalion in the 1890s, and was severely wounded in the First World War).

Textually, the paper will explore how Hewins's narration of memory:

draws on a range of discourses, circulating in early 20th-century society, linked to his community roles as storyteller and singer. Hewins, himself literate, inhabited what was still a predominantly oral culture. Of the discourses apparent in the narration, traditional (rural) folk tales and songs form a minor element; while the (urban, commercial) mode of music-hall comedy and song is dominant.

reveals how his individual identity is structured by identifications with and attachments to (a repertoire selected from) available social roles, enacted and expressed (albeit implicitly rather than explicitly) through available discourses. These roles included those of: "orphan", worker, father, singer, soldier. Close reading uncovers one dimension of his life-narative in which he was a "victim" – of economic circumstances, psychological drives and state power; and another by which he sought to (re)gain some control over aspects of his life. (Show less)

This paper will look at the specific regional experiences of men working in the reserved occupations in Glasgow and Clydeside during the Second World War. It forms part of a wider PhD research project exploring the ways in which the fluid gender identities, particularly masculinities, of those who worked in reserved occupations are remembered within oral history interviews. Wartime was a period of disruption for many in Scotland, and this paper will examine the extent to which the gender identities of civilian men on the Home Front reflected such disruption, experiencing change during the years of conflict.
Emergent studies of masculinity have so far neglected the experiences of civilian men, including those in the reserved occupations, and have failed to explore the complexity and fluidity of masculine identities in different regions of Britain. This new study in a previously under-researched field examines how the experiences of men in reserved occupations in Glasgow and Clydeside relate to wider discourses of hegemonic masculinities and gender identities, as well as wartime rhetoric on social change, and sheds crucial new light on the masculine identities of workers in a specific locality during the Second World War, a key time of conflict in British history.
The paper will therefore focus on complex and shifting identities in a period of conflict and social change. Reference will be made principally to personal testimonies held within the oral history collections at Glasgow Museums, as well as new interviews conducted with surviving men who worked in Reserved Occupations. (Show less)

'You see this was total war. Everyone was in it. It was everywhere. Not only on the battlefields but in the valleys where Goronwy, the coal miner, carries his own weapons to his own battlefront.’
This quote, from the 1946 Humphrey Jennings’ film A Diary for Timothy, represents a common trope, and idealised image, of the war by suggesting, through its comparison of the civilian man to the military man, that civilian and military contributions to the war were equivalent. However, despite Jennings’ and others efforts, the depiction of civilian men in the workplace often undermined and destabilised this ideal image of equality of sacrifice. This paper will analyse the representations of men in reserved occupations in the most prominent popular cultures of the war; film, radio and posters. It will also use Oral History to understand how the men depicted reacted to their representations. The key focus of the paper will be representations of gender identity with particular focus on the question of how these civilian men’s representations related to wider discourses regarding hegemonic masculinities and gender roles during the Second World War. It will argue that those in obviously dangerous occupations, for example firemen and merchant seamen, were granted access to much of the prestige which was generally granted to those in the armed services. Conversely, those in less obviously dangerous jobs, for example industrial and agriculture concerns, were often granted little media focus and were often shown to be vastly distanced from the ideal image of the man in the armed forces. Similarly, gender relations were also presented with vast differences between those in the dangerous and less dangerous occupation, with men in dangerous jobs being represented with, what can be described as, ‘traditional’ gender relations, while men in more sedate occupations were often shown to have been replaced or sidelined by female labour. (Show less)