Britain: society in transition Flashcards
How determining was social class at the start of the 20th century?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, social class
largely determined a person’s status and place in society.
The British class system was organised into four main
groups whose occupations and values can be generalised as follows:
Industrial working classes: People who worked as manual labourers or skilled craftsmen in factories, mines, docks and on the railways.
Lived predominantly in tight-knit communities
The skilled or artisan working classes were craftsmen who had specialised skills, earning more and often identifying with and aspiring to join the middle classes.
Lower middle classes: Workers in semi-skilled clerical jobs; small business owners who tended to own their own homes.
Middle classes: Professionals (doctors, lawyers, bankers, civil servants), who did highly specialised tasks.
Upper classes: Families who had inherited wealth, land and titles, often represented in the House of Lords.
Natural supporters of the Conservative Party.
Most senior army officers who fought the
First World War were upper class, as were a significant number of ministers (25 out of 59 cabinet posts) in Asquith and Lloyd George’s wartime cabinets.
What was the decline in deference seen Post-WW1?
The high death toll (704,803 men from Britain were killed) shook the confidence the working classes had in the upper-class generals who led them. Moreover, life in the trenches had often resulted in working-and middle-class men interacting on a more even basis. (sharing dangers and what comforts there were). Both these factors led to a decline in the deference in which the upper classes and middle classes were held. This was to decline further throughout the twentieth century. particularly after the Second World War in the 1950s and 1960s.
What was the decline in the upper classes seen Post-WW1
The death toll among Britain’s upper classes was disproportionately high in the First World War. In 1914 alone six peers, sixteen baronets, six knights and 261 sons of aristocrats lost their lives. Many families were forced to pay death duties for those killed. Death duties themselves, introduced in 1894, were instrumental in what many historians such as David Cannadine have called ‘the decline of the aristocracy’. Elder sons often had to sell their land or stately homes to pay these. Before 1914 less than 10 per cent of those working the land owned it; by 1930 this had risen to 33 per cent.
Many aristocrats could not afford to maintain their grand homes. Some were sold to the National Trust; others were sold as schools or hotels; some fell into disrepair as owners could no longer afford to live in them. However, one should not over-exaggerate the impact; the Duke of Portland owned eight grand houses in 1914 and despite straitened circumstances still maintained four in 1939,
What was the greater equality seen among classes Post-WW1?
The experience of war had resulted in a more democratic society, with the passing of the 1918 Representation of the People Act . People in work could improve their living standards in the interwar years and even in the worst years of the depression prices fell faster than wages. As a result many people felt more equal. They had surplus income and could aspire to more affluent lifestyles than their parents.
How is housing an indication of improved living standards for the industrial working class?
One indication of improving living standards was a growth in the construction of houses for owner-occupiers. The number of owner-occupiers rose from 750,000 in the early 1920s to 3,250,000 by 1938. They were particularly evident in growing suburbs where increased car ownership and the extension of the railway network made it possible for more people to travel to work. The term ‘Metroland’ was coined for an area of north London serviced by the growth of the Metropolitan Railway and developed with houses built
speculatively by builders who anticipated a ready market.
How did Class and Social Values change from 1918-39?
Although some commentators at the time, particularly in the immediate years after the war, feared open class revolt, these changes did not lead to social barriers and conventions significantly breaking down.
In 1919 the British government feared open revolt in some parts of the country, such as Clydeside. Much of this was the result of long-term economic factors, but it also suggested that working-class attitudes towards other social groups had changed.
In 1926, at the time of the general strike, The Times, a newspaper that tended to represent the views and concerns of Britain’s middle classes, attacked the strikers calling them unpatriotic class warriors. Middle-class volunteers organised to break the strike, identifying with what they believed was the national interest.
These examples of ‘class conflict’ were, however, rare. In the mid- to late 1920s strikes were actually in decline and the Conservative Party continued to enjoy widespread working- and middle-class support in general elections, suggesting that there was far less class conflict than commentators at the time originally thought.
The experience of the Great Depression, instead of bringing the country to the point of revolution, actually served to undermine working-class solidarity. Union membership rapidly declined due to unemployment and, while some regions like south Wales and the northeast were badly affected, there was a growth of new jobs and affluence in the Midlands and southeast. Unions in affluent areas were unlikely to strike in solidarity with poorer unemployed workers, irrespective of how sympathetic their members may have been.
In 1939, then, the class system and society was not so different from 1914. The Second World War and the years that followed were to see greater changes.
What was the impact of WW2 on class?
The social research organisation, Mass Observation, reported frequently throughout the war that working-class people interviewed by researchers expressed a desire for a more equal Britain after the war, but were unsure about what shape this equality would take.
Many onlookers at the time were sure that the experience of the war would make Britain a classless society. Some historians in the post-war era have argued that a social revolution took place.
Evacuation, the experience of being made homeless through bombing, and the hardships of rationing caused people of all social classes to co-operate and interact in ways that they had never done before and this, it has been argued, caused class barriers to diminish.
However, Mass Observation studies suggest that actually very little social change happened during the war and that class distinctions remained, sometimes reinforced by wartime experiences.
For example, in many instances, wartime evacuation of working-class inner-city children to more affluent rural homes reinforced class prejudices instead of diminishing them.
Child psychologists Susan Isaacs and Anna Freud both reported in 1939 the widespread phenomenon of bed wetting (a clear sign of children in emotional distress from the stresses of evacuation) being blamed by host families on the poor standards of inner-city working-class families.
What were post-war attitudes on class like?
The 1945 General Election at the end of the Second World War saw both parties campaigning on a platform of greater state intervention in society, suggesting that attitudes towards the role of the government had changed. The establishment of a Labour government committed to nationalisation and a welfare state dramatically changed the role of the state in people’s lives. Despite these changes, brought about by the experience of war, ideas about social class seemed not to have shifted dramatically.
Britain’s class system, privilege and deference remained largely intact. Some Labour ministers believed that institutions such as the House of Lords and the elite public schools Eton and Harrow should be abolished, but the Attlee government had not been elected to carry out such radical policies. The Labour landslide victory was less a revolt against the class system and more a recognition that the hardships of the 1930s were not to be repeated.
The bigger changes in social values and deference based on class were still to come with the advent of a more liberal society in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
What was the post-war decline of deference?
An end to rationing in 1954 and the relaxation of consumer credit enabled working-class households to enjoy a level of prosperity they could scarcely have dreamt of a decade earlier.
It also meant that traditional ideas about community, social class and social mobility became increasingly challenged; people began to question the class system not from a position of poverty, but from a place of prosperity, surrounded by the comforts that consumer capitalism could afford them.
Television and cinema exposed audiences to satirical entertainment which ridiculed ideas about social class, while writers and filmmakers questioned the class system, and tabloid newspapers exposed scandals involving the ruling classes.
What is the ‘satire boom’?
One of the clearest examples of a decline in deference came with the ‘satire boom’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In 1960 a subversive and popular stage show ‘Beyond the Fringe’ starring among others Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, played to packed audiences. It attracted fierce controversy for making fun of Britain’s establishment: the government, Army and the upper classes.
One sketch titled ‘The Aftermyth of the War’ poured scorn on Britain’s war effort, even though for most people the war was a recent memory and a victory of which to feel proud.
The success of the stage show led to a satirical TV programme ‘That Was the Week that Was’, starring David Frost, which combined satirical humour with interviews of leading politicians. It was the first time that the British public had seen elite political figures on the television being questioned rigorously by journalists, and it represented a clear change in public attitudes to authority
What is the ‘British New Wave’?
A generation of writers and filmmakers also articulated Britain’s changing attitudes towards the class system in a movement that was loosely termed the ‘British New Wave’. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a profusion of novels about working-class men and women coming to terms with the end of the old working-class world of the pre-war era and the birth of new prosperity.
One example is the Alan Sillitoe novel Saturday Night Sunday Morning (1958), which became a film starring the actor Albert Finney in 1960. It featured an angry young working-class man, Arthur Seaton, who has contempt for his bosses, the authorities and even his own community. Arthur is an amoral character who is desperate to escape his background, but who enjoys all the benefits of the new consumerism. Far from being a left-wing working-class hero, he is a product of the affluent society. Both the book and the film were very popular and indicated that working-class ideas about respect for authority and the older generations were in decline.
What were the sex scandals discovered in 1963 (Profumo affair)?
In early 1963, an unprecedented sex scandal engulfed the British establishment and shocked its citizens. To an extent the revelations resulted from the growth of satire, itself a mark of decline in deference so the scandal both developed and resulted from changing social attitudes.
Rumours began of sex parties regularly held at Cliveden, a stately home owned by the wealthy Astor family, featuring important establishment figures. The satirical magazine Private Eye was particularly important in reporting these rumours but the rest of the press latched onto them, especially when it was alleged that Minister of War John Profumo was sharing a nineteen-year-old sexual partner, Christine Keeler, with a Soviet attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov. While there was no evidence Profumo had divulged any state secrets (or indeed that Ivanov had in fact ever slept with Keeler), the potential for blackmail was evident.
Prior to the Profumo scandal the sexual indiscretions of politicians, the royal family and other establishment figures were routinely ignored by Britain’s powerful press barons. However, in 1963 the Profumo scandal was featured on the front pages of the Mirror, News of the World, Daily Express and Daily Mail.
People were shocked by the revelations of sexual activity, especially after Profumo at first vehemently denied such behaviour then later admitted to it. Profumo resigned in March 1963 and some commentators believe that the scandal led to the defeat of the government, by four seats, in the 1964 General Election.
This scandal was significant in the decline of deference in British society. People were shocked not only that members of the establishment had been indulging in seedy practices but that they routinely lied about such involvement until caught out. This marked a watershed when people realised their leaders were not necessarily paragons of virtue and didn’t deserve people’s trust purely by virtue of position.
What were the attitudes towards sex in the 1950s?
In the 1950s the view that the state had a role in regulating private sexual behaviour, particularly homosexuality, was widely accepted.
By 1949 less than one-tenth of the population had received any kind of sex education and there is little evidence that parents discussed sex with their children. A popular view from foreign observers and contemporary commentators in the 1950s was that the British were reserved and sexually repressed. This seems unlikely.
• Cases of venereal disease were high in Britain until the discovery of penicillin, and prostitution flourished during the Second World War.
• A 1950s survey concluded that half of all women born between 1924 and 1934 had sex before marriage.
• From the 1930s onwards there was a growing demand for advice books about sex. Eustace Chesser’s 1941 book Love Without Fear, which explained that both men and women could enjoy sex, had sold 3 million copies by 1964.
This shows that there was a big difference between what British people in the 1950s said about sex and what they actually did. Looking at these statistics, it might be possible to argue that Britain did not experience a sexual revolution in the 1960s but that sexual behaviour had been steadily changing throughout the century. If any revolution took place among the British public it was a revolution in how open or explicit they were willing to be in discussing sex.
How did the attitudes towards sex change in the 1960s?
Statistical evidence gathered in the 1960s tends to suggest that the popular image of the decade, one of decadence and sexual exploration, is misleading.
Michael Schofield’s The Sexual Behaviour of Young People, published in 1965, was based on interviews with 2,000 teenagers and uncovered the following:
• One in three boys and one in six girls between sixteen and nineteen had had sex.
• Nearly all of those that had were in established relationships and were not promiscuous.
Another study, conducted five years later, by Geoffrey Gorer came to similar conclusions. In this survey attitudes towards sex before marriage, homosexuality, infidelity and contraception were very similar to popular attitudes in the 1950s. Gorer’s study suggests that attitudes had not particularly changed at all by 1969.
What was the impact of the media on the sexual revolution?
Nevertheless, there was an increased openness in talking about sex in the 1960s.
Britain’s newspaper industry played an important role in the dissemination of sexual ideas.
During an age of mass consumerism advertisers paid to place their advertisements in the tabloid press, knowing they would reach a wide audience.
Tabloid sex scandals. and the discussion of sex in news articles and features not only captured a large readership but associated sex with celebrity and consumerism. For example many advertisements featured sexual allure as a sales technique to sell products.
What was the reason for the growing opposition tot he liberal society and the sexual revolution?
For most people in Britain, the sexual revolution was something that featured in the newspapers, but was not experienced personally. By the end of the 1960s most people’s attitudes towards sexuality and their lifestyles were conservative. The sensational reports of celebrity scandals in Britain’s newspapers gave their readers a misleading picture of the nation’s attitudes towards sexuality.
Other newspaper stories portrayed sexual liberation as having shocking consequences. When the Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were convicted of killing three children in 1966, the press focussed on the fact that the two were unmarried and in a sexual relationship, creating a connection between this and their violent crimes. The fact that their relationship status had no bearing on their actions was often overlooked by newspaper readers who were shocked by the crimes and alarmed by what they believed was a rapid decline in ‘moral’ standards.
Sensational stories of upper-class sexual behaviour were accompanied throughout the 1960s with articles about the behaviour of British teenagers. Sexual behaviour was linked in tabloid stories to teenage crime, vandalism and hooliganism, fuelling a moral panic about the state of Britain’s youth.
A conservative reaction to the perceived decline in moral standards was led by campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and Lord Longford.
Who was Mary Whitehouse?
In 1964 a school teacher with devout Christian values, Mary Whitehouse, launched a campaign group called Clean Up TV.
She believed that television was the most corrupting medium in modern life and was introducing un-Christian ideas to British youth.
The rapid popularity of Whitehouse’s new organisation indicated that many people agreed with her. At the first meeting of Clean Up TV over 70 coaches full of campaigners filled Birmingham Town Hall and most of their criticism was directed against the BBC.
Not only did Mary Whitehouse condemn scenes of a sexual nature on television, but also images of drinking, criticism of the royal family and references to crime and lawlessness.
Her views were often far more extreme than those of her supporters. She believed that television and consumerism were eroding faith in God in Britain and that her task was to bring the country back to what she believed were its original Christian roots.
What was the NVALA?
In 1965 Whitehouse co-founded the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVALA), which attracted campaigners from the general public, senior Church of England bishops, chief police officers and MPs.
Not only was the NVALA opposed to sex, violence and swearing on television, but its members associated permissiveness with what they believed was a creeping ‘socialism’ in Britain.
Mary Whitehouse condemned ‘Marxist, humanist’ ideas and many of her members believed that Christianity was under threat from a mixture of socialism, consumerism and television.
Even though these ideas were dismissed by most of the population as absurd during the 1960s and 1970s, the fact that Whitehouse claimed NVALA had attracted over 100,000 members after its formation shows that fears about ‘moral decline’ in Britain were widespread.
The NVALA was made up predominantly of people from outside London who lived in the Midlands, the northwest, Yorkshire, the northeast, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Many activists looked at London with suspicion and disgust, associating it with the ‘swinging’ sixties, promiscuity and pornography.
The organisation’s impact, however, was limited. It is possible that Whitehouse and her supporters exaggerated its membership from the start and there is little evidence that the media ever really took it seriously. The NVALA made a lot of noise and gained a lot of publicity but its influence on TV and radio programming was minimal.
SUCCESSES:
On a wider level the NVALA may have influenced legislation banning child pornography with the PROTECTION OF CHILDREN ACT of 1978 and indecent advertisements with the INDECENT DISPLAYS ACT of 1981.
In terms of specific successes, its efforts were instrumental in getting the movie Deep Throat banned in Britain and in 1976 it was involved in efforts to get a Danish filmmaker who wanted to make a movie about Christ’s sex life banned from Britain.
Perhaps the most famous campaign was to initiate a successful blasphemy trial against Gay News for what was perceived to be a heretical poem about Christ.
what was the Chatterley trial an d what was its impact?
When Penguin Books published D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, the story of an aristocratic woman who has an affair with her working-class groundsman, the government decided to prosecute the publisher under the OBSCENE PUBLICATIONS ACT 1959. The Act had actually been introduced to relax censorship, enabling a jury to consider ‘literary merit’ when deciding if a book was obscene.
The jury decided that Lady Chatterley’s Lover had sufficient merit and found in favour of Penguin. The publicity surrounding the case caused sales of the book to soar. The case demonstrated to the public that the laws surrounding obscenity were outdated and Britain’s attitude towards sex and morality was changing. Many historians regard it as the start of Britain’s ‘permissive society’.
One result of the Lady Chatterley trial and the end of censorship of books and magazines that contained ‘obscene’ material was the growth of the pornography industry. Areas of cities such as Soho in London became synonymous with shops selling pornography. Pornography was still illegal but the Obscene Publications Act was so ambiguously worded that prosecuting sellers and publishers was very difficult. Low printing costs and corrupt policemen in the Obscene Publications Squad of Scotland Yard enabled the industry to flourish.
What was the Wolfenden report?
In 1957, following pressure from church groups and moral campaigners, the Macmillan government published the Wolfenden Report.
The report said that there had been a decline in ‘morality’ since the war and that family life had been weakened. Lord Wolfenden believed that the law against prostitution should be made harsher, but that homosexual activity between consenting adults over the age of 21, in private, should be decriminalised.
Wolfenden believed that prostitution was a public display of ‘immorality’ whereas male homosexuality was at least hidden and took place behind closed doors. This meant that the state could police public acts of sexuality but it had no right to regulate private life.
What was the SEXUAL OFFENCES ACT 1967?
In 1958 the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) was founded. This followed a letter to The Times calling for a reform to the law, signed by the former prime minister, Clement Attlee.
The HLRS was active in campaigning for a change to the law and in lobbying the government to implement the Wolfenden recommendations.
From 1960 to 1966, there were various attempts to introduce a Sexual Offences Bill based on the Wolfenden Report and finally, in 1967, the SEXUAL OFFENCES ACT was passed by a narrow majority.
Parliament also passed the 1967 ABORTION ACT , which legalised abortion of a pregnancy up to 28 weeks.
Neither move was particularly popular, showing that despite the new affluence of the 1960s some attitudes towards private life had not changed.
Of those interviewed by Schofield and later Gorer, 85 per cent disapproved of homosexuality and half believed it should be punished more severely.
Even though most people in Britain during the 1960s had not experienced the glamorous hedonism of ‘swinging’ London, had lived lives of conformity and normality and were not part of the ‘permissive society’, a reaction against much that the 1960s seemed to stand for began towards the end of the decade.
What was the festival of light?
One leading figure of moral conservatism by the late 1960s was the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. He founded an organisation called the Festival of Light, along with Whitehouse, the pop star Cliff Richard, Labour cabinet member Lord Longford and Christian missionaries Peter and Janet Hill. The organisation’s aims were to:
- prevent the sexualisation of television
- promote Christian teachings.
Nationwide events organised by the festival in 1971 included the lighting of beacons on hill tops, which attracted over 100,000 people to take part. However, it did little to change the content of TV programmes or to alter public attitudes towards sex. The overtly evangelical approach of the Festival of Light alienated many people who shared their concerns but who were not church-going Christians.
What was the franchise of women like post-WW1?
In March 1918 the REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE ACT enfranchised women over the age of 30 if they were a member or married to a member of the local government register, a graduate voting in a university election or a property owner.
This meant that only educated and ‘respectable’ women were enfranchised; however they comprised 43 per cent of the electorate (8.4 million voters) in the December election that year.
In the same Act, all men were enfranchised at the age of 21 and had women been granted the same rights they would have made up the majority of the electorate due to the high losses of men during the war.
Britain’s working-class women did not receive the vote until 1928 when all women rate payers were enfranchised on the same terms as men in the REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE ACT (1928).
What were the employment opportunities for women like in and Post-WW1?
The First World War enabled many women to make considerable gains in the workplace as the entire civilian population was mobilised for war work.
Thousands of women also worked as auxiliaries, drivers, telephonists, signallers and nurses on the western front.
By 1918 a large female industrial workforce had developed and there were over 1 million women in the metals and chemical field alone.
Women also took roles in public life that had always been the preserve of men, such as working on the railways and trams.
The decade after the war saw many of the gains that women had made overturned as a result of the harsh economic realities Britain faced after 1918.
Wartime employment was only required as long as the conflict continued. In addition the return of fighting men from the First World War forced many women out of the workplace.
The government had introduced a ‘DILUTION’ AGREEMENT with the trade unions in 1914, meaning that skilled workers who went to fight in France could be replaced by semi-skilled labour, including women workers, on two main conditions:
• Their employment lasted only as long as the war did.
• The new workers would not be able to profit from the war and would not be paid higher wages than the men whose jobs they were filling.
Consequently the numbers of employed women returned to 1914 levels when the war ended (approximately 5.7 million).
The return of men to the workplace and the home seemed to herald a return to the traditional ideas about gender that had existed before the war. When women did work they returned to their traditional occupations such as service or clerical work.
