Modern British History

Sport, manhood and empire: British responses to the New Zealand rugby tour of 1905

by John Nauright

This article analyzes British responses to the successes of the 1905 New Zealand All Black rugby team in the context... more This article analyzes British responses to the successes of the 1905 New Zealand All Black rugby team in the context of fears of racial degeneration in Britain. It further explores how the British viewed the New Zealand team's innovative style of play including changes to standard formations used in the game as well as specialized positional play. Finally concepts of colonial robust masculinity suggested to British experts that the British "race" was not necessarily in decline in the colonies of settlement as evidenced both by troop performance in the South African War of 1899-1902 and on the playing fields.

'Brief Encounters': Baltic Hospital Workers in and around Huddersfield, 1946 - 1951

by Frank Grombir

Published in the Huddersfield Local History Society Journal in May 2012, Issue No. 23, pp. 51-58

This article analyses the early days of post-war immigration into the Huddersfield area in relation to around forty... more This article analyses the early days of post-war immigration into the Huddersfield area in relation to around forty Baltic women employed in local hospitals.

In the five years following 1946 these women made their contribution to the post-war reconstruction of England’s services but most of them did not sink roots in Huddersfield soil. This account aims to look more closely at these individuals and examine why their stay was so brief, including the details of their work and the general reception by the host society.

When the Party Comes Down: The CPGB and Youth Culture, 1976-1991

by Evan Smith

Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History, 4, 2012 (in press)

'Bomb back, and bomb hard': debating reprisals during the Blitz

by Brett Holman

Australian Journal of Politics and History (accepted; September 2012).

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other... more In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. This 'Blitz spirit' is still called to mind during times of national crisis, for example in response to the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London. But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or harder. As the Blitz mounted in intensity, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns featured calls for heavier reprisals against German cities. That the RAF's bombing efforts over Germany at this time were in fact wildly inaccurate and largely ineffective is beside the point: nobody in Britain was aware of this yet. The reprisals debate was the logical legacy of prewar assumptions about the overwhelming power of bombing; it has been forgotten
because it contradicts the myth of the Blitz.

The Labour Party and the Economics of Rearmament, 1935–39

by Richard Toye

This article examines the Labour Party’s attitude to the finance of the British rearmament programme in the later... more This article examines the Labour Party’s attitude to the finance of the British rearmament programme in the later 1930s, principally with reference to debates in the House of Commons. It is suggested that the party’s opposition to the National Government’s borrowing for rearmament was strongly influenced by continuing bitterness over the political crisis of 1931; and that focussing criticism on the economic aspects of the rearmament programme helped Labour to mask its divisions over the validity of rearmament itself. Labour politicians’ varying reactions to John Maynard Keynes’s arguments in favour of defence borrowing are explored; as is the party’s attitude to, and impact upon, Neville Chamberlain’s 1937 proposals for a ‘National Defence Contribution’. Moreover, it is argued that, as the political situation in Europe deteriorated, Labour’s policies were influenced further in the direction of central planning and ‘conscription of wealth’, as an alternative to borrowing, which was alleged to be inflationary. Finally, it is suggested the party’s attitude to these questions is illustrative of the way in which economic ideas in the public sphere are inevitably conditioned by the political interests of the politicians who promote them.

Did 1989 Matter? British Marxists and the Collapse of the Eastern Bloc

by Evan Smith

in P. Kimunguyi & E. Polonska-Kimunguyi (eds), Transitions Revisited: Central and Eastern Europe Twenty Years after the Soviet Union, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, Warsaw, 2012 (in press - available June 1, 2012).

http://scholar.com.pl/sklep.php?md=products&id_p=2247

Contact me for a draft version of the paper.

Are the Kids United? The Communist Party of Great Britain, Rock Against Racism and the Politics of Youth Culture

by Evan Smith

Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 5/2, Fall 2010,  pp. 85-117

'The Further One Gets From Belfast', a second reply to Jeff Dudgeon

by Niall Meehan

Irish Political Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, February 2012

I am grateful to Jeffrey Dudgeon for replying on the contentious subject of the killing of thirteen civilians and four... more I am grateful to Jeffrey Dudgeon for replying on the contentious subject of the killing of thirteen civilians and four British Army personnel in West Cork in late April 1922. I am grateful also to IPR for facilitating the discussion.

Dudgeon ignored my remarks (IPR November 2011) on Peter Hart’s errors and misrepresentations concerning the 28 November 1920 Kilmichael Ambush. I do not know if that means he now accepts my argument. Dudgeon concentrates instead on vindicating Hart’s view of the ‘April killings’ in West Cork in 1922, seen as ‘emblematic’ of IRA attacks on Protestants during the War of Independence period.

In the course of his reply, Dudgeon attempted to demonstrate that Irish Republicanism is anti-Protestant, even though republican ideology and action ‘claim[s] to be non-sectarian’.

During the late 18th Century some Irish Protestants founded The Society of United Irishmen and a significant number, mainly Presbyterian, broke from an assumed allegiance to the colonial system of Protestant supremacy. This tradition of Irish Republican separatism was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone. It was influenced by the American and French Revolutions, the first uprisings in human history to be influenced by secular as distinct from religious ideology. The subsequent 1798 United Irishmen inspired rebellion failed and was brutally suppressed.

These Protestant republicans were considered caste traitors. The best-known modern example is the last Protestant Editor of the Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, who considered himself a republican in the Wolfe Tone tradition. According to Major Thomas McDowell, the newspaper’s then Managing Editor and a fellow Belfast born Protestant, Gageby was (as reported in 1969 to the British Ambassador to Dublin), ‘a renegade or white nigger’.

According to Dudgeon, republicans practice ‘(fake) non-sectarian[ism]’. It is in essence devious, a kind of Roman Catholicism of the fundamentalist Protestant imagination. This view requires empirical proof. Depicting most of the late April 1922 West Cork killings as sectarian and as part of a pattern is therefore important to Dudgeon, who is an Ulster Unionist. Since the Ulster Unionist Party cannot easily shake off accusations of consistent sectarian practice in Northern Ireland (because it is a fact), events like the April killings are a basis for suggesting that the competing Irish ideologies cancel each other out, while confirming a need for ethnic separation. It is a rationale for partition on the basis of sectarian equivalence, a familiarity that breeds contempt.

I will look at this question of IRA sectarianism in two parts, first in terms of the April killings themselves, second with regard to whether they were ‘emblematic’ (Dudgeon’s term) of a consistent practice.

[The rest, including Jeff Dudgeon's piece, is in the attached PDF. Also included, an article from the same IPR edition on General Frank (FP) Crozier, first Commander of the Auxiliary Division, by Manus O'Riordan]

World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945

by Brett Holman

War in History 17 (2010), 313-32.

This paper argues that the remarkably widespread enthusiasm in Britain after 1918 for an international air force was... more This paper argues that the remarkably widespread enthusiasm in Britain after 1918 for an international air force was due to a confluence of two factors: the long-standing liberal belief that international law could prevent war, and the emergence of a new theory of warfare which claimed that the bomber was a weapon which could not be defended against. The origins of the international air force concept in the 1920s, its apogee in the 1930s, and its decline (and revival) in the Second World War are examined, showing that its fortunes rose and fell with internationalism and the knock-out blow.

The air panic of 1935: British press opinion between disarmament and rearmament

by Brett Holman

Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011), 288-307.

The British fear of bombing in the early twentieth century has aptly been termed ‘the shadow of the bomber’. But the... more The British fear of bombing in the early twentieth century has aptly been termed ‘the shadow of the bomber’. But the processes by which the public learned about the danger of bombing are poorly understood. This paper proposes that the press was the primary source of information about the threat, and examines a formative period in the evolution of public concern about airpower — the so-called air panic of 1935 — during which German rearmament was revealed and large-scale RAF expansion undertaken in response. A proposed air pact between the Locarno powers enabled a shift from support of disarmament to rearmament by newspapers on the right, while simultaneously supporting collective security. Paradoxically, after initially supporting the air pact, the left-wing press and its readers began to have doubts, for the same reason: the need to support collective security. This episode sheds new light on Britain’s early rearmament, and how the government was able to undertake it, despite the widespread feelings in the electorate in favour of disarmament.

'The problem with Punch', Historical Research, 82 (2009), pp. 285-302

by Henry Miller

The comic periodical Punch is a popular source with academics working on the Victorian period and it has often been... more The comic periodical Punch is a popular source with academics working on the Victorian period and it has often been regarded as a ‘national institution’. This article takes a more nuanced view, arguing that Punch was primarily aimed at a metropolitan and middle-class audience, although it did have considerable reach. Punch largely ignored provincial Britain and had little understanding of its mighty movements like Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League and the temperance movement. To get a better sense of public opinion in Victorian Britain as a whole, rather than just London, this article looks at the local comic periodicals which flourished all over Britain from the late eighteen-sixties to the nineteen-hundreds. The cartoons in these periodicals were very different from London cartoons, and national symbols of identity like John Bull and Britannia were surprisingly absent. Local identities were often personified instead. The ‘nationalization’ of the press from the eighteen-nineties presaged the disappearance of these local comic periodicals and cartoons in the Edwardian period.

'Review of Democracy and the Vote in British politics, 1848-1867: the making of the Second Reform Act, by Robert Saunders', Reviews in History, Institute of Historical Research

by Henry Miller

'Radicals, tories or monomaniacs?: The Birmingham currency reformers in the House of Commons, 1832-1867', Parliamentary History, (forthcoming, 2012)

by Henry Miller

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader... more Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood’s Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood’s brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early and mid-Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People’s Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. Muntz’s death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham’s radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasised Birmingham’s contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers’ views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.

'Popular petitioning and the corn laws, 1833-1846', English Historical Review (forthcoming, 2012)

by Henry Miller

The influence of the Anti-Corn Law League, and particularly its leader, Richard Cobden, on the development of free... more The influence of the Anti-Corn Law League, and particularly its leader, Richard Cobden, on the development of free trade in Victorian Britain has been recently restated. Even so, it remains a commonplace that the League’s origins as a self-interested manufacturers’ lobby essentially precluded the support of workers, who preferred to campaign for radical political reform. Popular apathy or indifference towards the League, however, should not be mistaken for support for the corn laws.

This article breaks new ground by using public petitions, which have been largely neglected by historians of nineteenth century politics, to analyse and map popular attitudes on the issue. Although changes to the parliamentary procedure relating to petitioning had a significant  impact on the reformed House of Commons, especially the way it debated, they did not dampen the popular culture of petitioning.

Although the procedural reforms encouraged the development of a numbers game out of doors, anti-corn law petitions and signatures were not simply manufactured by the League,  but reflected a vibrant and highly diverse culture of popular petitioning. A quantitative and qualiatative study of public petitions indicates that the corn laws were unpopular across large swathes of urban Britain. Despite the recent emphasis on the universalism of Cobden’s ideas, petitions against the corn laws often reflected distinctive local political traditions and economic interests, even while emphasising common themes. The League’s abandonment of petitioning for an electoral strategy reduced the space for participation in the campaign for those without financial means or the franchise.

'Popular petitioning and the corn laws, 1833-1846', English Historical Review (forthcoming, 2012)

by Henry Miller

The influence of the Anti-Corn Law League, and particularly its leader, Richard Cobden, on the development of free... more The influence of the Anti-Corn Law League, and particularly its leader, Richard Cobden, on the development of free trade in Victorian Britain has been recently restated. Even so, it remains a commonplace that the League’s origins as a self-interested manufacturers’ lobby essentially precluded the support of workers, who preferred to campaign for radical political reform. Popular apathy or indifference towards the League, however, should not be mistaken for support for the corn laws.

This article breaks new ground by using public petitions, which have been largely neglected by historians of nineteenth century politics, to analyse and map popular attitudes on the issue. Although changes to the parliamentary procedure relating to petitioning had a significant  impact on the reformed House of Commons, especially the way it debated, they did not dampen the popular culture of petitioning.

Although the procedural reforms encouraged the development of a numbers game out of doors, anti-corn law petitions and signatures were not simply manufactured by the League,  but reflected a vibrant and highly diverse culture of popular petitioning. A quantitative and qualiatative study of public petitions indicates that the corn laws were unpopular across large swathes of urban Britain. Despite the recent emphasis on the universalism of Cobden’s ideas, petitions against the corn laws often reflected distinctive local political traditions and economic interests, even while emphasising common themes. The League’s abandonment of petitioning for an electoral strategy reduced the space for participation in the campaign for those without financial means or the franchise.

John Maynard Keynes and the New Poland: Pro-German Sentiments at the Treasury

by Leszek Gluchowski

Annotated paper originally presented to the symposium ‘British Perspectives on Poland, 1915-45’ at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University of London, on 14 October 1989.  See Pamiętnik literacki (London), vol. 15 (1990), p. 139, for a report of the conference.

Healthcare, voluntarism and the state in twentieth-century Ireland and Britain

by George Campbell Gosling

VAHS blog (September 2011)

I recently made my first visit to Dublin. Being invited to workshops is always nice, and when you get to go somewhere... more I recently made my first visit to Dublin. Being invited to workshops is always nice, and when you get to go somewhere new that’s even better. So this was a real treat for me. It must be a treat for every historian – it’s a city just dripping with history.

Even just on the coach coming into the city, a particular building grabbed my attention. There was just something about it, I was sure I knew it. When I looked it up, the building was the General Post Office that played such a crucial role in the 1916 Easter Rising. What I hadn’t seen from across the road was the bullet holes still visible in the columns.

But the treat for me wasn’t just being in a city of history and Guinness. I spent Friday at an excellent workshop organised by Trinity College, Dublin’s Dr Sean Lucey with Oxford Brookes University’s Professor Virginia Crossman on the theme of ‘healthcare, voluntarism and the state in twentieth-century Ireland and Britain’. ...

For the Sick Poor? Payment and Philanthropy in the British Voluntary Hospitals before the National Health Service

by George Campbell Gosling

VAHS seminar paper, delivered at the IHR in London, 20 June 2011

Also available as an audio podcast at http://historyspot.org.uk/podcasts/voluntary-action-history/sick-poor-payment-and-philanthropy-and-pre-nhs-voluntary-hospital

ABSTRACT: The voluntary hospitals were widely perceived as the crown jewels of British voluntarism until they were... more ABSTRACT: The voluntary hospitals were widely perceived as the crown jewels of British voluntarism until they were nationalised with the introduction of the NHS in 1948. From their philanthropic foundations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they provided care and treatment for the sick poor. By the time of the NHS medicine had changed a great deal, as had Britain. The scientific advances in medicine now meant that hospitals could do more and that treatment could not always be provided in the home. Meanwhile, the phasing out of the poor law and the rise of the lower middle classes contributed to the calls for a hospital service that could treat all classes.

How then, this paper will ask, did these philanthropic institutions, the voluntary hospitals, adapt to this new age? Fundamentally, the introduction of three types of payment will be considered. The first is the new profession of the hospital almoner, later renamed the medical social worker, who operated a means-tested system for working-class patients. The second is the hospital contributory schemes, which offered an alternative to the almoner. The third is the private wards for middle-class patients. Historians have tended to agree that these developments amounted to a fundamental reinvention of the voluntary hospitals. This has sometimes between characterised as 'commercialisation' other times as 'mutualisation' or the establishment of 'quasi-insurance' system. Amongst these differing approaches there is a consensus that radical change did occur.

This paper will draw upon new research to put forward the case that such change has been overstated. Payment did not cover the costs of provision let alone a profit, nor was payment a condition of access, meanwhile income limits ensured that provision remained focused on the working classes. These practical changes were a response to changing times designed, largely successfully, to allow the voluntary hospitals to maintain their traditional mission of providing hospital care for the sick poor. Despite such change, the voluntary hospitals in their final decades were actually characterised by a remarkable degree of philanthropic traditionalism.

"Open the Other Eye": Payment, Civic Duty and Hospital Contributory Schemes in Bristol, c. 1927-1948

by George Campbell Gosling

Medical HIstory, vol. 54, no. 4 (2010), pp. 475–494

ABSTRACT: The decades preceding the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 saw a widely recognised... more ABSTRACT: The decades preceding the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948 saw a widely recognised ‘diversification’ of voluntary hospital funding in Britain. This included the growth of semi-insurance hospital contributory schemes. Such schemes in Bristol were numerous and radically different approaches amongst them contributed to a crippling rivalry. Despite this, they shared a common view of contribution as a civic duty. This article will consider the ways financial contribution on the part of the local workpeople was said to be a responsibility to themselves, their families and their community. The impact of this on the patient contract in the city’s voluntary hospitals will be interpreted as demonstrating a shift from a moral to an economic brand of reciprocalism in parallel with the developments in municipal hospital services and prefiguring the arrangements of the NHS.

Healthcare and the community in modern Britain

by George Campbell Gosling

Family and Community History, vol. 12, no. 2 (2009), pp. 101-106

The papers in this focus section contribute to a broader historical debate regarding the relationship between... more The papers in this focus section contribute to a broader historical debate regarding the relationship between 'healthcare and the people'. Opening the section, both thematically and chronologically, Richard Biddle's narrative begins with the community's changing healthcare needs before moving to consider the degree to which local services responded to these changes. A wider significance of his contribution is be found in his assessment of the nature and scale of those local services, provided publicly through the navy in an era when public provision was dominated by the poor law.

Meanwhile, Stephen Soanes maps out a professional debate over the extent to which progress in mental hospitals could be achieved through the inclusion of the public. In doing so, Soanes highlights the professional reassertion that the community should be the subject rather than the agent of reform, passive rather than active.

This theme is picked up by Leigh Merrick, who documents the sidelining of local authorities as vehicles for public representation within the newly established Scottish National Health Service. This is placed against a backdrop of central failure to resolve disputes, the lowly place given to local authorities under the hierarchical structure of the NHS and a lack of co-operation amongst local authorities themselves.

It is, therefore, the notion that the community has been consistently alienated from the governance of public healthcare that dominates these papers. ...