Representations of Working-Class Masculinities in Post-War British Culture

The Left Behind

Matthew Crowley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429535710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents an analysis of representations of white, heterosexual, working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989 to trace the development of the sociocultural and material conditions that shaped the masculinities which are helping to shape contemporary culture.

This book seeks to fan the 'spark of hope' in the past that informs our present. The period which saw the establishment of the welfare state and the construction and breakdown of the post-war consensus in British politics was of great significance in the formation and maintenance of working-class masculinities and their correspondent representations. The author engages with a variety of cultural texts across various modes and media including films ( Alfie ), plays ( Don't Look Back in Anger ), television ( Boys from the Blackstuff ), and music ( The Beatles ), and employs the analysis of the representation of working-class masculinities as a lens through which to examine a range of historical and cultural moments. This book reinstates class as a central precept in the study of British cultural representations and offers a timely intervention in ongoing debates around class and gender identities in Britain.

The book will be key reading for students and researchers with interests in twentieth-century social and cultural British history, masculinities and gender studies, twentieth-century British literature, British television, and cultural studies more broadly.

1Home sweet home

The post-war settlement, 1945–1951

The end of the Second World War signalled the beginning of a new period of uncertainty in Britain. The concerns underpinning that uncertainty were articulated by an anonymous soldier upon his return:

[u]nderlying our joy and thankfulness there is one uneasy question, what about the future? What will happen now? Will we the people who have won the war drive home our victory against fascism by defeating our pre-war enemies of poverty and unemployment?

(Anon. in Loach, 2013)

The end of the war was a moment of return: a return to peace and, for many, a return home. But, that ‘moment of return’ was also a point of departure. The war represents a clear historical rupture, a moment which substantially altered social life. At the same time, within the inevitable rebuilding that followed the war, millions of individuals were attempting to reconstruct their lives and return to ‘normality’. But after six years of global conflict what is normal? The war had changed things. Women had changed. Men had changed. Britain had changed. Ben Shephard states that ‘[t]he war veteran of the 1940s was returning to a very different world’ (2002: 335). This can be understood literally: in many instances the physical landscape had been altered, not only in the frontline theatres of war, but also domestically as a result of the sustained attacks on civilians, property, and national infrastructures. Many servicemen returned to find their homes, and their loved ones, had been lost while they were away. The required rebuilding would be emotional as well as physical. Difficult choices would have to be made within this process of rebuilding. The collective and individual responses to those choices would have a profound and long-lasting effect on British culture. This is a period in which complex and often contradictory sets of ideas, actions, and interactions informed emergent discourses of class and masculinity. These discourses shaped the Britain the servicemen returned to, the way that men were represented within it, and ultimately the men themselves.

During the war Britain had been altered beyond the immediate and obvious physical changes. The war had resulted in a greater political awareness which proved a catalyst for change (Priestley, 1941). The Labour government of 1945 adopted many of the proposals set forth in the ‘Beveridge Report’ of 1942. The impetus for change that the war provided was used to introduce the Family Allowances Act in 1945, the National Insurance Act and the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act in 1946, the National Health Service Act in 1946 (which came into effect on 5 July 1948), the Pension Act in 1947, and the Landlord and Tenant (or Rent Control) Act in 1949. Alongside this legislation Clement Attlee’s government nationalised the Bank of England (1946), the National Coal Board (1947), the railways (1948), and the iron and steel industries (1950). The period which immediately followed the Second World War saw the founding of what became known as the ‘welfare state’. These were profound and radical changes which sought to alter the structures upon which British life was founded, but they existed in tension with a wave of nostalgia.

Historically, nostalgia (derived from the Greek nostos [return home] and algia [longing]) was a term that was applied to homesick soldiers. Shephard asserts that ‘nostalgia returned with a vengeance between 1939 and 1945’ owing in part to ‘the sheer numbers of people taken from their homes and sent off to far away places’ (2002: 242). This nostalgia manifested as a desire for places and people. ‘[T]he local Gazette, Star or Post describing events in their home town’ became a ‘treasured’ possession for active servicemen as they ‘craved’ for news from a recognisable locality (Shephard, 2002: 242). Ronald Blythe argued that during the Second World War ‘the mood of these longings for home shifted from landscape to the family and its circle’ (Blythe quoted in Shephard, 2002: 242). While Ronald Fairburn identified ‘separation anxiety’ as the ‘only single symptom’ that was ‘universally present’ in cases of war neurosis (Fairburn quoted in Shephard, 2002: 242). Put simply, nostalgia was the desire of the serviceman to return to the place that he came from. The shift identified by Blythe and Fairburn indicates how the idea of ‘place’ connects locality and community, key factors in the concept of social class. Overcoming the connotations of ‘knowing ones place’ became a central concern in the reconfiguration of Britain that followed the war.

The home that the returning servicemen of 1945 had left behind no longer existed: beside the physical changes and greater political awareness, there had been a comprehensive reorganisation of the British economy and the nation’s means of production. Women had, temporarily at least, broken free of the domestic sphere and entered the world of paid employment (see Hopkins, 1991; Kynaston, 2008; Rowbotham, 1997; Wilson, 1980; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2002). At its peak during wartime the number of married women in employment had exceeded 7.2 million. That number was reduced to 5.8 million by September 1946 (a clear indication of the efforts to return women to their ‘traditional’ roles that followed the war) (Kynaston, 2008: 99). Further, 1944 had seen the negotiation of the Bretton Woods Agreement which set forth rules for ‘post-war monetary and financial relations’ (Ikenberry, 1993: 155). The implications of this agreement may not have been immediately apparent, but the agreement itself signalled a shift in the balance of world power. Britain’s position was precarious. The nation’s economic and industrial capabilities had been weakened by the war, a situation which disrupted the foundations of the male breadwinner role. Men returning from the war faced uncertainty about their position in society. An idealised post-war home premised upon secure employment and the avoidance of the privations of the interwar years was by no means guaranteed. For many this idealised home was premised on the successes of ‘wartime socialism’ but, as Eric Hargreaves and Margaret Gowing observe, ‘the principle of “fair shares” [was] a principle unknown to the peace-time economy’ (1952: 628).

The notion of fair shares was a principal theme of British wartime propaganda (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2002: 2). It remained central in the combined effort of the government and the armed forces to convince servicemen and women, and the British people more broadly, that this was their war. The idea of ‘the peoples’ war’ was skilfully utilised by the Labour Party at the conclusion of the conflict as they promised to ‘win the Peace for the People’ (Young, 1945: 2). Their landslide victory in the 1945 general election meant that a fundamental recasting of British society looked distinctly possible and that the change that so many hoped for may happen. Those hopes were far from universal however, and the ‘post-war political consensus’ was never a comprehensive one. Novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Angela Thirkell’s Peace Breaks Out (1946), and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949) seem to long for the rigid class hierarchies of pre-war Britain (see Sinfield, 2004). Other texts of the period, such as Monica Dickens’s The Happy Prisoner (1946), focus on the return of middle-class officers and, while not ostensibly opposed to a more egalitarian Britain, rely heavily on pre-war class structures in their characterisation. Other post-war tensions are also evident in The Happy Prisoner. The novel’s chief protagonist is Major Oliver North, who has returned to his well-to-do mother’s cottage after losing a leg and having a ‘shell splinter’ graze ‘the outer muscle of the heart’ (1948: 14). The novel positions Oliver in the feminised domestic space of the pastoral cottage, his injuries a metaphor for the return of a broken masculinity. The novel is essentially a romance as it charts the burgeoning relationship between Oliver and his nurse, Elizabeth. Their relationship demonstrates a reaffirmation of Oliver’s masculinity, while acknowledging the altered position of women in society as a result of the war. Oliver, although strong and brave, is ultimately reliant upon his female aide. The theme of the returned amputee is also present in Henry Green’s novel Back (1946), a complex novel about loss, desire, and the effects of the war upon social conventions in post-war Britain. Back, much like The Happy Prisoner, indicates a shift in gendered relationships but deals more explicitly with the psychological difficulties encountered by returned servicemen as they attempted to reintegrate themselves into society and the mundane realities of everyday life. H. E. Bates’s The Cruise of the Breadwinner (1946) deals with the encroachment of the war upon the everyday lives of working men (as the name of the titular vessel suggests). The novella tells the story of a day on the Breadwinner, a small civilian ship which, captained by the distinctly working-class Gregson, patrols along the coast of the English Channel. After happening upon a dogfight, the crew of the boat, which includes the young cabin boy Snowy and its engineer Jimmy, rescue two young upper-class pilots, one English, one German. After rescuing both the pilots the Breadwinner comes under attack from a Luftwaffe plane, killing Jimmy and injuring everyone bar Snowy. The Breadwinner races back towards shore under the stewardship of Gregson (whose injuries are minor), while the two pilots (who are both severely injured) fight for their lives (the symbolic demise of the ‘upper class’ at the conclusion of the war). The impact of the war upon gendered relationships, social hierarchies, and the difficulty faced in societal reintegration in these texts indicates a structure of feeling in which the boundaries of class and masculinity in Britain are being renegotiated. This was a period in which, having found a way through the war, men of all classes now had to find their place, as men, in peace.

J. B. Priestley’s Three Men in New Suits was written and printed ‘some time before the European War ended’ and published in 1945 (Priestley, 1984: 5). During the war Priestley became a prominent figure in the ideological struggles that occurred on the home front. Priestley’s Postscripts radio broadcasts, which aired weekly from 1940 to 1941, reached audiences of millions.¹ Priestley also authored propaganda material such as Out of the People (1941) and The Arts Under Socialism (1947) which clearly set out his position as a socialist. Priestley’s approach was far from revolutionary, but it undoubtedly captures something of the desire for change that seemed to permeate Britain at the end of the war. Set in the fictional village of Lambury, the eponymous protagonists of Three Men in New Suits fall (rather too) neatly into the different strata of what David Cannadine calls ‘the triadic version’ of society, which consists of ‘upper, middle and lower collective groups’ (2000: 19). Priestley’s approach is reliant upon a gross oversimplification of the complex social, cultural, and economic factors that constitute the structures of the British class system. However, the framework allows Priestley to examine the issues faced by returning servicemen from perspectives that range across the class spectrum. The depiction of class as a clearly divided three-tier system also represents a recurrent means of framing and discussing class in Britain. As such, the approach offers some insight into the way the people of Britain thought about, and engaged with, issues of class at the conclusion of the Second World War.

The novel begins in the saloon bar of the village pub, a scene recognisable as the type of pastoral imagery that is often attributed to a collective British consciousness. Yet we are also presented with an image of a Britain that has been profoundly altered. This is succinctly demonstrated by the demography of the characters present in the bar. The bar is occupied by two elderly men who are, presumably, too old to have taken active service in the war; two young women, ‘probably from the aircraft factory’, who are drinking together without male company; and the barmaid, a ‘middle aged woman who came down to Lambury from London during the flying-bomb period’ (1984: 7). The young men of the village, and by implication Britain, are notably absent. ‘What next?’ hangs in the middle of the opening page (1984: 7). The question both an invitation for the narrative to begin and the manifestation of serious contemplation over the future of the nation. The remainder of the novel is a response to that ‘uneasy question’ (Anon. in Loach, 2013). Ostensibly, Three Men in New Suits is a simple story of servicemen returning home after the war. However, the complexities of their reintegration and the wider implications of their return are soon indicated. Priestley’s description of the precise moment of return reads: ‘Then it was all different. Three young men in new suits came in’ (1984: 8). The sense of abrupt change and the suggestion of the pervasive nature of that change are worth noting here. The phrase ‘[t]hen it was all different’ refers not only to the immediate atmosphere in the bar but also, by implication, to the village and to Britain as a whole (1984: 8, my emphasis). The fact that the men return together is significant, as the reader quickly discovers, as without the intrusion of war these are the men that would not normally have mixed..

The titular suits are also significant. At a time when clothing was still being rationed, it had been agreed that all male members of services would be provided ‘an issue of clothing coupon-free and free of charge’ (Hargreaves and Gowing, 1952: 324). Among this issue was the ‘demobilisation [demob.] suit’. In 1944 it was decided that ‘demobilised soldiers could not be offered civilian clothing in austerity styles’, a decision that effectively ended austerity restrictions on men’s outerwear (Hargreaves and Gowing, 1952: 439). In the years that immediately followed the war clothing production became a key area in which the ideological battle between ongoing state regulation and a free-market economy was fought. As Zweiniger-Bargielowska observes, ‘Labour’s continued commitment to Socialist planning, economic controls and fair shares stood in stark contrast to the Conservative advocacy of decontrol and return to the free market’ (2002: 4). Rather than the supposed post-war consensus, what becomes apparent in the immediate post-war period is a deep ideological divide. The socialist ideal of productionism and regulation on the one hand, the capitalist ideal of consumerism and the free market on the other, each determined that their policies were the most suitable means to tackle ‘post-war economic dislocation’ (Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 2002: 207).

The axiomatic historic connections between clothing, identity, and class mean that the eponymous (demob.) suits, alike in all but colour, come to symbolise the successes (and failures) of wartime socialism. The newness of the suits indicates that the men have only recently been demobilised and establishes a situation in which recent combat experience and exposure to its corresponding traumas are probable. On describing the men entering the bar Priestley writes, ‘they brought with them a sharpened and hard masculinity’, emphasising the effect of the war upon contemporary masculinities (1984: 8). These young, sharp, hard masculinities, juxtaposed against the lack of youthful masculinity in the opening passage, demonstrate the profound disruption that the reintroduction of ex-servicemen into civilian life represented (both for the men themselves and for Britain more broadly). The uneasiness of the men’s return is further emphasised by the novel’s setting. The representation of Lambury draws from familiar bucolic ideals and is employed as a formal device that positions the setting as the ‘green and pleasant land’ that the men have been fighting for. This is the home they share.

On entering the bar, the man described as ‘tallish, fair, good-looking’ is revealed as the upper-class gentleman Alan Strete; the man of ‘similar height but dark and beaky’ is the middle-class farmer Herbert Kenford; the third man, described simply as ‘burly and battere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Home sweet home: The post-war settlement, 1945–1951
• 2 Changing the subject: The ‘Angry Young Men?’, 1950–1960
• 3 Swinging for him?: The ‘working-class moment’, 1960–1970
• 4 (In)correct grammar: School and the ties that bind, 1970–1981
• 5 And then what’s left?: The New Right, 1979–1989
• Conclusion: The left behind
• Index