Strikers and Townsfolk: civic culture and industrial relations in post-war Hawick

Abstract

Following the work of Patrick Joyce, there has been an increasing awareness that class-formation in Britain was tempered by pre-existing cultures at the local level. The case of Hawick suggests that this was no less true of the post-war period: as late as 1972, the attitudes of employers and workers alike were shaped by a hegemonic tradition of civic pride and deference, anchoring the town's experience of deindustrialisation in a deeply local history. Focusing on the local knitwear workers' strike of that year, this article explores how civic identity and traditions of community cohesion shaped the town's experience of globalisation and economic decline, arguing that this moment of crisis should be read as a renegotiation of traditional norms, rather than their wholesale replacement. Protest organised along class lines, far from indicating a potent class consciousness, was simply a bargaining chip in that renegotiation.