Psychiatric nurses have long been portrayed as peripheral figures in the history of mental healthcare, subordinate to medical authority or as agents of institutional discipline. This article re-evaluates their role, arguing that nursing labour was central to the affective life of the mental hospital. Drawing on oral histories of former nurses, patients and other staff of two defunct hospitals, as well as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archival sources, it examines how psychiatric nursing created community and belonging within institutional settings. Close analysis of these testimonies highlights the affective labour and interpersonal skills involved in sustaining the hospital's social worlds. Nurses emerge not as passive enforcers of institutional control but as key relational actors who mediated between institutional structure and psychosocial rehabilitation. This article reframes institutional care as a negotiated space in which nurses played a foundational role in cultivating care, social connections and relational continuity relevant to current policy debates.
Despite significant literature on coal mining communities, there is relatively little research that focuses on the East Midlands, and even less that considers the importance of language in understanding their interrelations. Using oral histories to examine the less tangible aspects of coal mining heritage, this article considers the importance of relations that developed in the pit, how they filtered out into the wider community, and why this has continued to matter beyond the closure of the pits. It argues there was a mutual importance of relationship-building inside and outside the mines that strengthened the bonds within the mining communities. This was also mirrored in the use of language which played a crucial role in boundary creation. Over time, with pits no longer in operation, and incomers moving into former pit regions, the intangible bonds have been eroded, and the chance of these connections being passed on to future generations is likely to be lost.
This article focuses on concepts of occupational community in the recent history of benefit fraud in the UK. It suggests that two 'community' reference points (with strong historical foundations) have come to dominate the current literature: physical concentrations of benefit claimants and benefit fraudsters in particular communities, which themselves have a sustained presence in media commentary; and the neighbourhoods in which benefit fraudsters live, some of which hide fraudsters while others are hotbeds of reporting. Drawing on 24 oral histories of benefit fraud and fraudsters alongside other contemporary and historical sources, the article will argue that other forms of community also have a key place in how fraud is understood by ordinary people. In particular, the analysis will suggest, for the first time, that understanding the importance of, and re-creating genuine, occupational community can play an important role in future policies on dissuading fraud.
After 1834, most of the parishes in England and Wales were formed into New Poor Law Unions, each with a workhouse for indoor relief. This caused distress amongst women, whose relief changed from payments to supplement an independent living, to institutionalisation within a workhouse. In the 1840s, Praxell Alford Hinwood, a single woman with an infant child from Wiltshire, strongly disliked the workhouse system. She made this clear in a series of criminal acts of resistance in the Warminster Union, details of which are reconstructed using rare solicitors' papers. Using a microhistory influenced biographical approach this paper expands our understanding of womens' agency and resistance in the New Poor Law workhouse and how it was dealt with by the authorities. Rather than accept the treatment she received from the workhouse staff and the Board of Guardians, Hinwood broke workhouse windows and wrote a series of threatening letters. The workhouse system was one where women inmates could negotiate for better conditions and shed light on the immorality of the regime, as recent literature attests. But the workhouse system had a significant imbalance of power towards the authorities who, with money and legal clout, were able to remove women from the workhouse system altogether.
The British Empire Exhibition was held in Wembley in 1924 and repeated in 1925. Its aims were to develop new markets for Empire products and to promote the benefits of the Empire to the people of Britain. A key objective was to encourage migration to the Dominions, but within a decade, many migrants were returning to the UK, because of global recession. In 1926 the Dominions sought, and gained, autonomy over external affairs, and independence moves gained ground across the Empire. The major impact it had was on Wembley and the surrounding area due in part to the improvements to transport infrastructure for the Exhibition and the creation of Wembley Stadium as a national sporting stadium. In the twenty-first century, the area has seen large redevelopment, as a result of the rebuilding of Wembley Stadium and is one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the country, many of whom have their roots in former colonies of the Empire. This article examines the role of the periphery, and the Dominions in particular, in the planning of the Exhibition, and the response of successive governments. It will also consider the legacies of the Exhibition, internationally, nationally and locally.
