Twentieth Century British History

Journal Article Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966-1982. By David G. Reagles Get access Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966-1982. By David G. Reagles. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 2021. x + 213 pp. ISBN 978-0-2280-0881-1, $55. Daniel S Loss Daniel S Loss Harvard University, USA dloss@fas.harvard.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 583–585, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad011 Published: 13 February 2023

Journal Article The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State. By Shaul Bar-Haim Get access The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State. By Shaul Bar-Haim. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2021. +295 pp. ISBN 9780812253153, £60. Sarah Crook Sarah Crook Swansea University, UK s.r.e.crook@swansea.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1288-1488 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, hwad007, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad007 Published: 19 May 2023

Journal Article Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870-1939. By Laura Harrison Get access Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870-1939. By Laura Harrison. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2022. xiii + 256 pp, plates, figures. ISBN 978-1-5261-4787-5 £80 (hardback). Tom Hulme Tom Hulme Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland t.hulme@qub.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, hwad015, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad015 Published: 28 February 2023

Journal Article Homeward Bound: Return Migration from Ireland and India at the End of the British Empire. By Niamh Dillon Get access Homeward Bound: Return Migration from Ireland and India at the End of the British Empire. By Niamh Dillon. New York University Press, New York (Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series), 2023. x + 245pp. ISBN 978-1-4798-1731-3, $30, £25.99. Anna Maguire Anna Maguire University College London, UK anna.maguire@ucl.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9867-1122 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, hwad042, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad042 Published: 16 May 2023

Journal Article Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945–1979. By Malcolm R. Petrie. Who Runs Edinburgh? By David McCrone Get access Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945–1979. By Malcolm R. Petrie. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2022. x + 213 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-5698-2, £85.Who Runs Edinburgh? By David McCrone. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2022. xii + 299 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-9831-9 (paperback), £14.99. Robert Anderson Robert Anderson University of Edinburgh R.D.Anderson@ed.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, hwad041, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad041 Published: 31 May 2023

This article contends that common representations of the history of the British economy and economic policy in the 'Golden Age' period (circa 1950-73) as a story of 'failure' rely overwhelmingly on one measure, that of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. Drawing on the foundational criticisms of this metric made by Simon Kuznets, it is argued that, for this period of British economic history, shortfalls in measured GDP growth in comparison with other rich countries are a very poor measure of changes in economic well-being in the UK. If we follow this argument and discard the belief that one metric can summarize trends in such well-being, the notion of 'failure' in this period should be set aside in favour of a more nuanced, multidimensional assessment.

Journal Article Squatting and the State: Resilient Property in an Age of Crisis Get access Squatting and the State: Resilient Property in an Age of Crisis. By Lorna Fox O'Mahony Marc L. Roark. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022.480pp. ISBN 9781108738033, £29.99 E T C Dee E T C Dee Independent researcher, UK E-mail: deetc@riseup.net https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9178-6165 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 34, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 845–847, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad031 Published: 24 April 2023

Grace Scholefield was appointed the regional organizer of the Women’s Labour League in South Wales in 1916. Originally from Halifax, she and her husband Nathan had been early members of the Keighley Independent Labour Party (ILP) and Labour Church. When they moved to Merthyr Tydfil in the mid-1890s, they became founder members of the local ILP. After Keir Hardie’s election to Parliament, Nathan was appointed organizing secretary of the ILP in South Wales. But Grace herself was equally integral to the labour movement–campaigning for Hardie, organizing the ILP annual conference, and chairing meetings of the Women’s Social and Political Union as well as the ILP. After women’s enfranchisement, she was among the first women magistrates in Wales. Yet her decades of campaigning were all but forgotten after the First World War, as a new generation of women activists rose to prominence. One of these was Elizabeth Andrews, whose autobiography did much to erase the efforts of those who had come before her. Scholefield’s life thus exemplifies some of the key themes of this excellent book—the consistency of women’s activism, the centrality of working-class women to politics in Wales, the vast contribution that they made to public life, and how easily they are forgotten.

Journal Article Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s–1960s. By Yann Béliard and Neville Kirk (eds) Get access Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s–1960s. By Yann Béliard Neville Kirk (eds). Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2021. xviii + 331pp. ISBN 9781800859685, £83.60. Duncan Money Duncan Money Independent Scholar duncanmoneyhistory@proton.me Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, hwad021, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad021 Published: 25 March 2023

Journal Article Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900—1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations. By Julia Neville, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Paul Auchterlonie, and Ann Roberts Get access Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900—1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations. By Julia Neville, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Paul Auchterlonie, and Ann Roberts. University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 2021. v + 281 pp. ISBN 978-1-905816-77-4, £25.00 Anna Muggeridge Anna Muggeridge University of Worcester, UK anna.muggeridge@worc.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 34, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 393–395, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad005 Published: 19 January 2023

It is likely that many readers of this book will be familiar with the considerable body of scholarship concerning deindustrialization, working-class communities, and labour relations produced by Jim Philips, Valerie Wright, and Jim Tomlinson over the last two decades. Studies by Tomlinson on Dundee, with Wright on the industrial decline in Jute, Philips’ examination of Scotland’s coal mining industry, plus Wright’s own work on housing and communities in and around Glasgow have suggested that, as Tomlinson argued in this journal in 2016, deindustrialization and its consequences provide one of the most potent underpinning narratives of the twentieth-century Britain. This book continues to unpick the political consequences of deindustrialization, focusing in this instance on the ways in which customs and expectations embedded in working-class communities adapted to, and often clashed with the logics of economic restructuring in industry between the 1950s and 1990s. The distinctive qualities of Scotland’s ‘moral economy’—a concept defined here with reference to the work of Karl Polanyi and E.P. Thompson—were central to how both the working classes and a newer portion of the middle classes perceived the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the British state’s policies that dealt with deindustrialization. If, as Philips has previously argued, devolution and the rise of Scottish nationalism were shaped by deindustrialization, then this book further shows why Westminster’s approaches to dealing with it, especially under Margret Thatcher, fuelled such a profound and often visceral shift in Scottish politics away from traditional political parties.

Journal Article Class of ’37: Voices from Working-class Girlhood. By Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer Get access Class of ’37: Voices from Working-class Girlhood. By Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer. Metro Publishing (John Blake Publishing Ltd), London, 2021. xi–xxiv, 248 pp. ISBN 978-1-78946-450-4, £16.99 hardback; ISBN 978-1-78946-408-5, £9.99 paperback. Rebecca Goldsmith Rebecca Goldsmith University of Cambridge, UK relg2@cam.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 34, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 385–386, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad001 Published: 11 January 2023

Journal Article United Kingdom. By Adrian Bingham Get access United Kingdom. By Adrian Bingham. Polity Press, Cambridge, 223 pp. 2022. ISBN-13:978-1--5095-3756-3, (pb) £12.99. Martin Conboy Martin Conboy University of Sheffield, UK E-mail: m.conboy@sheffield.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, hwad044, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad044 Published: 19 May 2023

This book charts the evolution of Labour’s economic ideology from the early twentieth century to the present day. It does so by drawing principally on a diverse range of secondary works, supplemented by the author’s own reading of policy documents and works of economic thought by leading Labour thinkers. Its central theme is the ways in which the party’s economic ideas were forged in response to different economic and political crises. The impact of crisis could vary markedly. The crisis of the Second World War, for instance, broadened expectations of what the state could and should achieve in a manner which bolstered support for Labour’s programme of social welfare and economic intervention. This showed crisis as a positive generator of ‘social learning’, with the electorate emboldened by crisis to seek a better way forward. So too the shock of the financial crisis of 2007/8 enabled Gordon Brown’s government to showcase the benefits of a more Keynesian economic approach than had been pursued under his Prime Ministerial predecessor, Tony Blair.

This book is one of a small number of volumes in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series that is dedicated to a theme or a historical event (broadly understood) rather than a single text or author. It squeezes a Special Subject into one set of soft covers by making available extracts from thirty-one texts, most of which will be familiar to specialist readers. Extracts from book-length studies, notably The Framework of Home Rule (1911) by Erskine Childers, are joined by more occasional pieces, including short essays, speeches, and journalism that testify to the centrality of the popular press and public demonstrations to early twentieth-century Irish politics. Iconic political texts, since given the status of books, were often first read in serial form. Among those included by key nationalist thinkers and leaders are extracts by John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule Party, Eoin MacNeill, the civic republican and joint progenitor of the Irish Volunteers, and Patrick Pearse, the revolutionary separatist. Most conspicuous are seven extracts from the corpus of the socialist republican James Connolly, a bounty that runs the danger of diminishing returns, though, of all the texts assembled here, they are probably the most influential today. Wherever Green is Red, as Mick Lynch recently reminded us, there is Connolly. The diet might have been varied with selections from P. S. O’Hegarty and Aodh de Blácam, who both wrote about post-1916 nationalism and are subject to excellent recent analyses by, respectively, Frances Flanagan and Sean Donnelly. British and Irish Unionism is represented by extracts from the writings of Leo Amery, Edward Carson, Ronald McNeill and, most importantly, A.V. Dicey. Of the seventeen authors included, four are women, all nationalists, including the historian Alice Stopford Green and the socialist republicans Constance Markievicz (née Gore-Booth), Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and Louie Bennett. All are supported by good biographical summaries. The absence of language and/or cultural nationalists, the subject of much historical work, is striking. No W. B. Yeats. Given that the History of Political Thought is a relatively new field in Irish history, it would have been helpful if the introduction had explained these choices.

Ronan Point was a residential tower block that partially collapsed in Newham in 1968, provoking a nationwide scandal. The Ronan Point disaster is frequently cited as a symbolic ‘turning point’ in the urban history of Britain, but it has been surprisingly underexplored on an archival level. It has been identified as a moment at which high-rise architecture was overwhelmingly discredited: a defining event within narratives of ‘urban crisis’ and ‘decline’ in late twentieth-century Britain. This article proposes that the Ronan Point scandal should be understood as a moment of democratic crisis, rather than one unique to the ‘inner city’. The disaster foregrounded a profound democratic deficit within the political culture of post-war reconstruction. However, this article revises standard narratives of the Ronan Point disaster exclusively as a moment of crisis to consider it dually as a moment of possibility for the British welfare state, and for social democracy. The scandal constituted a key moment at which anti-deferential discourses were harnessed by grassroots actors to challenge the legitimacy of technocratic expertise and to lobby for a more participatory reimagination of the post-war settlement. The article goes on, nevertheless, to explore how such discourses of empowerment would also be mobilized to justify a movement away from public housing and towards owner-occupation.

Ronan Point was a residential tower block that partially collapsed in Newham in 1968, provoking a nationwide scandal. The Ronan Point disaster is frequently cited as a symbolic 'turning point' in the urban history of Britain, but it has been surprisingly underexplored on an archival level. It has been identified as a moment at which high-rise architecture was overwhelmingly discredited: a defining event within narratives of 'urban crisis' and 'decline' in late twentieth-century Britain. This article proposes that the Ronan Point scandal should be understood as a moment of democratic crisis, rather than one unique to the 'inner city'. The disaster foregrounded a profound democratic deficit within the political culture of post-war reconstruction. However, this article revises standard narratives of the Ronan Point disaster exclusively as a moment of crisis to consider it dually as a moment of possibility for the British welfare state, and for social democracy. The scandal constituted a key moment at which anti-deferential discourses were harnessed by grassroots actors to challenge the legitimacy of technocratic expertise and to lobby for a more participatory reimagination of the post-war settlement. The article goes on, nevertheless, to explore how such discourses of empowerment would also be mobilized to justify a movement away from public housing and towards owner-occupation.

This joint-authored essay concludes the thematic issue ‘Marking Race’. Drawing on the authors’ individual essays and reviewing the wider literatures in the field of race and immigration, imperialism and decolonization, social democracy and the welfare state, and deindustrialization, the essay makes a series of proposals about what an analytical focus on race adds to our understanding of modern British history.