{"title":"The urban geography of pop in sixties Britain.","authors":"Simon Gunn","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae065","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae065","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The explosion of pop culture in Britain between the late 1950s and the late sixties is usually taken to have been an urban phenomenon. Pop was the 'sound of the city' in Britain as much as America. But what kind of 'urban' was involved-big city, small town, centre, suburb? What kind of geographical reach did pop have across the different parts of the United Kingdom in the 1960s? What was the significance of London in a cultural movement that was simultaneously national and international? Understanding where pop was made and performed in its formative years helps explain why it took off so spectacularly in sixties Britain; it illuminates why post-war Britain was so receptive to and generative of pop music as well as the music's nationwide appeal. In this respect, the article contributes not just to the history of pop music and youth but to the larger cultural history of post-war Britain.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142961140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New moderationism: medical discourses on alcohol and the decline of drunkenness in interwar Britain.","authors":"Ryosuke Yokoe","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae060","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores the significant yet underappreciated role of medical experts in consolidating the promotion of moderate drinking as a viable solution to Britain's alcohol problem during the interwar period. The country's experience with alcohol regulation in the First World War showed that widespread drunkenness could be effectively managed through policies that restricted the availability of alcohol and encouraged moderation. This realization weakened the political standing of the temperance movement, as support for alcohol prohibition and abstinence waned, leading to the liberalization of social attitudes towards drinking. Such circumstances facilitated the emergence of New Moderationism, a renewed policy approach that regarded moderate drinking as relatively benign while cautioning against the dangers of heavy consumption. Medical professionals provided the conceptual foundation for New Moderationism by reassessing several assumptions on alcohol's conflicting reputation as either a 'poison' or a 'food', its benefits to drinkers, and its potential to cause disease. These considerations led to the conclusion that alcohol policy should focus not on whether people should drink, but on how much. This study thus underscores the pivotal contribution of medical professionals in the evolution of the alcohol debate between the two world wars, revealing the transformative impact of expertise on policymaking and social change in modern Britain.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142961139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'I am very sensitive on the subject of accent': Children, young people and attitudes to speech in inter-war Britain.","authors":"Hester Barron","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae052","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae052","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article considers elite and popular attitudes to speech and accent in inter-war Britain, specifically with regard to children and young people. It begins by showing that speech was a consistent preoccupation of educationalists, for whom classed prejudices complemented more progressive concerns about citizenship and employment. It continues by considering everyday school practices, charting the ways in which schools tried to influence their pupils' speech. Efforts were often variable-and Mass-Observation accounts show that teachers' attitudes were not always consistent either-but children might respond positively nonetheless. Finally, it considers influences external to school such as family attitudes, the wireless, and the cinema, showing that concerns with speech and language were not limited to an educational hierarchy but were often shared by working-class parents and sometimes children themselves. The article thus suggests that there was less of a difference between official attitudes and the (literal and metaphorical) vernacular than is and was often assumed. It argues that widespread attention to speech and language was one way in which social and educational aspirations were fostered amidst the new technologies, consumerism, and democracy of inter-war Britain.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The bust card: policing, race, welfare, drugs, and the counterculture in 1960s Britain.","authors":"Kate Bradley, Ellis Spicer, Jon Winder","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae062","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae062","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Bust cards first emerged in the late 1960s as a way of obtaining help following arrest, giving the user the number of a 24-h telephone line to call on arrival at the police station. In the 2020s, such cards were used by direct action groups involved in civil disobedience campaigns, but tracing bust cards back reveals that their original purpose was different. The bust card was a novel way of enabling an individual to push back against the immediate experience of hostile policing, while enabling organizers to collate information on what was happening. By foregrounding the object and examining its creation and development, this article explores how various influences, initiatives and imperatives intersected, and how activist ideas or tools spread across groups. As this article demonstrates, the bust card became part of wider activism to reform the criminal justice system. It was also about pushing to remake the relationship between the state and marginalized individuals, whether that was through an interaction with the police or through accessing public services.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142857453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'This modern Cinderella': Railway Queens, mass media, and British civic culture, 1925-75.","authors":"Conner Rivers Scott","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae054","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae054","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Between 1925 and 1975, the British railway industry elected beauty queens from the daughters of employees. Focusing upon the Railway Queens, this article will reveal the importance of beauty queens as 'civic celebrities', a novel role for public figures that emerged between the wars and helped to sustain a vibrant civic culture across the early to mid-twentieth century. It combined the traditional ceremonial function of 'civic' representative with the modern consumerist ethos of media 'celebrity'. Despite the gendered constraints of such competitions, this article posits that serving as a beauty queen enabled young working-class women to become legitimate representatives of various civic communities for the first time, whilst also enabling participation in the media's image-making of glamorous, consumerist femininities. As such, the role rendered civic and consumer cultures more inclusive and increasingly inextricable. This article further suggests that civic celebrities altered how communities were represented to themselves within British civic culture. If elites continued to represent hierarchical communities of authority and deference, then from the 1920s onwards, civic celebrities such as beauty queens began to represent relatively democratic communities of non-partisan inclusivity and consumer aspiration.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143049613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anti-Apartheid at the periphery: a case study of grassroots activism in Dundee, 1967-1990.","authors":"Matthew Graham, Christopher Fevre","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae064","DOIUrl":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae064","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The histories of the global anti-apartheid struggle, and particularly the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), have predominantly been examined through a transnational and national prism, creating an inaccurate impression of a highly centralized and homogeneous movement. We argue, however, that refining the analysis to focus on the local setting reveals a more complex and diverse movement, which has not been fully captured in the existing scholarship. Using Dundee as a case study, this article charts the emergence, character, and evolution of anti-apartheid sentiment and activity in this small, peripheral industrial Scottish city. By exploring student activities in the 1970s, the brief but influential presence of Southern African exiles in the city, the radical politics of Dundee AAM (DAAM), and the symbolic solidarity of civic actors, the article demonstrates where local AAM group autonomy and regionally specific conditions intersected to shape the distinct trajectory of anti-apartheid in Dundee. Within this local history, we uncover divergences with wider national trends, most notably DAAM's accommodation of the radical Revolutionary Communist Group, which complicates dominant narratives of entryism and tension between the far-left and the AAM. The Dundee example demonstrates that analysing anti-apartheid activities through a local lens establishes alternative readings of the multi-layered and divergent nature of British activism and of twentieth-century international solidarity movements more broadly.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142961137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Altogether Abnormal': Consumer-Citizens, Outsizes, and Clothes Rationing, 1941-9.","authors":"Tali Kot-Ofek","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae033","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>During the Second World War and the austerity period that followed it, the British government operated clothes rationing as a welfare policy. Its official aim was to ensure that all citizens had equal access to essential clothing. Despite being associated with the principle of 'fair shares', rationing did not work well for large-bodied consumers. Government agents' assumptions about citizens' bodies generated a rationing scheme that overlooked large bodies. As a result, rationing regulations and economic controls amplified the normalizing impulses of mass production, creating a constant shortage of ready-made large garments and a market in which purchasing power and access to goods depended on body size. Struggling to navigate this market, consumers attempted to hold the government accountable for its declarations of equality. Tracing this issue in government records and in local, national, and trade press, this article discusses how the conflicting motivations of state, trade, and citizens shaped rationing in a way that prioritized the culturally and statistically 'normal' and reflects on what mass welfare meant for citizens with 'abnormal' needs.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"35 2","pages":"164-179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142516216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forging the West Indian Nation: Federation and Caribbean Activism in Post-war Britain, 1945-60.","authors":"Elanor Kramer-Taylor","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae032","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores how Caribbean activists living in Britain after 1945 engaged with the movement for the West Indies Federation. By considering overlooked organizations such as the Caribbean Labour Congress, London Branch (CLC) and the West Indian Workers and Students Association (WIWSA), it shows that, first, Britain became a hub for Caribbean nationalism and support for Federation in the post-war years. Secondly, it argues that the West Indies Federation of 1958-62 significantly influenced the formation of important British Caribbean institutions, such as the West Indian Gazette and the Caribbean Carnival. In contrast to traditional narratives regarding post-war Caribbean political activity in Britain, which often treat the 1950s conjuncture through the lens of race and of the prehistory of a 'multi-cultural' Britain, this article seeks to recover a moment when British Caribbean activism was moved by a broader, transnational, self-consciously 'West Indian' nationalist movement. In doing so, it reveals the significance of the West Indies Federation, and Caribbean decolonization more broadly, to the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, and their political activities. Moreover, it illustrates how diasporic and exilic communities and figures continued to play an important role in anti-colonial and nation-building projects.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"35 2","pages":"147-163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142516218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dirty Documents and Illegible Signatures: Doctoring the Archive of British Imperialism and Decolonization.","authors":"Joel Hebert","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae035","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article uses the surviving records of the Hanslope disclosure to track the British government's efforts to censor colonial archives in the era of decolonization. As staff withdrew from colonies around the world, they were instructed to either destroy or 'migrate' to Britain large quantities of records that held sensitive, embarrassing, or potentially incriminating details about the history of British colonial administration. Some 25,000 files were eventually shipped to the UK in a program called 'Operation Legacy' where they fell into legal limbo and out of institutional memory. Millions more were burned or ditched at sea. This article pursues these archival policies as they gradually evolved from Malaya to East Africa, the Caribbean, and into the post-colonial era. In giving special attention to Operation Legacy's broader temporal and geographic sweep, this article meditates on two key points. First, while colonial officials actively learned from their colleagues in other colonies, they were forced to adapt Operation Legacy to local circumstances. The uneven application of this policy reflected the late British Empire's status as a patchwork of sovereignties in which people were governed differently. Second, while evidence is limited, officials across disparate colonial administrations were bound together by a common impulse. They sought not only to destroy and 'migrate' records but also to doctor files that could then be transferred to newly independent governments. In the end, the goal was to mask the disconnect in the archives between rhetoric and reality-of the alleged aspirations of Britain's 'civilizing mission' and its history of colonial violence, systemic racism, and other inconvenient truths.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"35 2","pages":"199-222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142516217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Monty, Bring the Blood Can!' Pulling Teeth in Working-Class Lancashire, 1900-48.","authors":"Claire L Jones","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwae036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae036","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Working-class health cultures before the National Health Service have long been of scholarly interest but those related to oral health are chronically underexamined. This article examines one important aspect of this history-tooth pulling-in early twentieth-century Lancashire. By highlighting the dynamics of market supply and demand, it demonstrates how and why the tooth pulling services of non-orthodox practitioners called dental mechanics remained popular despite the increasing monopolization of oral health by dentists. Dentists characterized mechanics as quacks, but working-class Lancastrians sought out these mechanics because they formed a trusted part of their communities. This demonstration of a population's preference for unorthodox over orthodox practitioners provides a much-needed counter-narrative to professionalization in oral health and highlights the significance of geographically specific traditions over the values of medicine and science.</p>","PeriodicalId":520090,"journal":{"name":"Modern British history","volume":"35 2","pages":"223-240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142516219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}