Family affairs: a history of the family in 20th century England

196 Pages·2003·1.02 MB·English

by  Mary Abbott

Family Affairs
In the decades between the close of the First World War and the end of the Thatcher era,
English families faced unprecedented change and challenges. Technology transformed the
housewife’s lot. Attitudes shifted. In 1920 cohabitation, abortion, illegitimacy, divorce and
homosexuality threatened family reputations; by 1990 they were commonplace.
Family Affairs explores the secret life of English families from 1920 to 1990. Mary Abbott
takes the reader into her subjects’ homes and hearts and provokes us to reflect on families
past and speculate on families future. A product of intense original research of primary and
secondary sources, this volume is an important contribution to the history of the family.
Abbott has a talent for the telling vignette, the graphic detail and pungent phrase. This is
an invaluable source for the student of family history as well as anyone interested in this
perennially fascinating subject.
Mary Abbott teaches at the Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge. Her previous
publications include Family Ties: English Families 1540–1920 (Routledge 1993) and Life Cycles
in England 1560–1720: Cradle to Grave (1996).
Family Affairs
A history of the family in 20th century
England
Mary Abbott

LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2003 Mary Abbott
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Abbott, Mary, 1942–
Family affairs: a history of the family in 20th century Britain/Mary Abbott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Family—Great Britain—History–20th century. 2. Social change—Great Britain—History–
20th century. I. Title: History of the family in 20th century Britain. II. Title.
HQ613 .A2 2002
306.85¢2094¢0904–dc21 2002031681
ISBN 0-203-44027-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-74851-4 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-14586-4 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-14587-2 (pbk)
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Cultural tribes 5
2 Between the wars, 1920–1939 23
3 ‘Not brave, just British’, 1939–1945 59
4 A better world, 1945–1960 83
5 Runaway world, 1960–1979 115
6 A decadent, undisclipined society? 1980–1990 143
Conclusion: prophesies fulfilled? 169
Index 177
Introduction
In 1920 decrees, commandments, laws and ordinances enshrined in the Old Testament
books of Genesis and Exodus represented the dominant code of conduct in Britain:
(cid:127) Honour thy father and mother
(cid:127) If a man entice a maid…and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife
(cid:127) Thy husband…shall rule over thee
(cid:127) Thou shalt not commit adultery.
St Paul ranked abstinence above sexual gratification:
It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless to avoid fornication let
every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband … It is
better to marry than to burn.
While there was power in the old morality, keeping up appearances paid dividends. As
Phyllis James (born 1920), the child of an unhappy lower-middle-class couple, observed,
when she was at school, the break up of a marriage ‘was still regarded not only as a disgrace
but as a social failure’ and an economic catastrophe. For her mother, ‘deeply religious, it
would have been a sin’. ‘I can’t complain’, ‘I mustn’t grumble’ were the mantras of the
married.
This regime did not go unchallenged. The literary lion H.G.Wells, born—into the lower-
middle class—in 1866, campaigned against the ‘haunting emphasis on sacrifice and
discipline’. His heroes were the radical intellectuals—William Godwin (born 1756) and
Percy Bysshe Shelley (born 1792). Wells addressed his liberating manifesto to men and to
women without children. His own marriage was far from conventional. According to his
own account, he and his wife Jane negotiated a modus vivendi. He was licensed as a ‘casual
lover’ whose extramarital ‘passades’ were to be indulged. She had ‘rooms of her own in
Bloomsbury’ where she inhabited ‘the personality of Catherine Wells’, a writer. While
they were alive, Wells protected his lovers’ reputations. The confessional postscript to his
Experiment in Autobiography (1934) was not published for another fifty years. Even then it
was expurgated. ‘Courtesy and concern over litigation’ led Wells’s son and editor to
suppress further material that was finally published in Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers: The Last
Affairs of H.G.Wells in 2001. It is impossible to estimate how common discreet extramarital
2 INTRODUCTION
‘passades’ were among the majority of men and women who did not choose to share their
secrets with posterity.
The women and men of 2000 were less prisoners of gender—and biology—than the
women and men of 1920. Thanks to Marie Stopes (born 1880), middle-class wives and
indeed confident and solvent single women of the 1920s and 1930s had unprecedented
control over their fertility. Painfully slowly, in the course of the following three or four
decades, contraceptives became freely available to the majority of women in Britain. Legal
abortions became common. As a result, a ‘hasty exchange of bodily fluids’ was much less
likely to result in the birth of an unwanted child. By the end of the century the stigma and
disabilities associated with births outside marriage had faded into insignificance. Men and
women were increasingly inclined to stay together ‘during pleasure’. George Bernard Shaw
(born 1856), called H.G.Wells ‘a spoiled child’. By the end of the century ‘spoiled children’
who rejected the traditional virtues of discipline and self-sacrifice abounded.
The evidence
The historian’s task is forensic: identifying fragments and piecing them together, making
educated guesses. Where I have had the choice, I have avoided sources tainted by hindsight.
Family Affairs draws on articles and advertisements published in newspapers and magazines;
entertainments, including anthologies of comic and curious verse; essays; letters; surveys
compiled by social scientists; texts written for medical students (indeed on a variety of
‘how-to’ books); still and moving pictures; objects of all kinds; conversations with friends
and, perhaps most of all, memoirs and biographies. Biographical writing biases the sample
towards an articulate minority. However, many people, celebrated in later life, were
brought up in ‘ordinary’ families: Phyllis or as she is better known P.D.James is an example.
I have fought shy of statistics. The distinguished social scientist Peter Townsend
underlined the tension between the social scientist’s anxiety ‘to establish patterns,
uniformities and systems of social action’ and ‘the uniqueness of each individual and each
family’. The film-maker Derek Jarman was more emphatic: ‘HAVE YOU EVER
THOUGHT OF BECOMING A STATISTIC?’ he asked.
We have to face up to the f act that images of family lives are much easier to recover than
the realities. The criminal law demands proof ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’; the civil law
operates the far less testing ‘balance of probability’. The evidence for the intimate life of
families, even in recent times, is unsafe. Often we cannot approach the benchmark required
in civil cases. Children grew up believing that families were meant to be happy—and
pretended that they were. A boy whose mother was unable to resist the temptation to ‘say
something hard or hurtful’ believed for a long time that his was the only unhappy family.
And, in photographs, even his family looked happy. Memories are fallible. In the 1930s the
unhappily married Mrs James ‘was compulsorily admitted’ to Fulbourne, the mental
hospital that served Cambridge where her family lived in the 1930s. In adult life her daughter
Phyllis could not remember precisely when that happened nor indeed ‘how long it was
before she came out again’.
INTRODUCTION 3
Negotiating Family Affairs
Family Affairs begins with an exploration of bonds and barriers in family and society. In the
chapters that follow families are set against a backdrop of the changing times they lived
through. In the course of the three-score-years and ten between 1920 and 1990 machines
inside the home and out of it made the household skills of making, mending, washing,
cleaning and even cooking obsolete. In the Twenties the two-child family was already the
norm in the expanding middle classes; by the 1990s parenthood had become a ‘lifestyle
choice’. The consequences were seismic.
But families have their own milestones and markers, tragedies and triumphs, births,
matings, and deaths.
4
1
Cultural tribes
The Census of 1921 assigned households to one of five occupational classes. The professional
person belonged to Class I; the unskilled manual worker to Class V. Life was more
complicated than most social scientists’ classifications suggest. The upper classes were not
homogeneous. In October 1918 the shy but daring Virginia Woolf, born into the intellectual
aristocracy of late-Victorian England in 1882, reflected on ‘the gulf between respectable
mummified humbug’ of the Kensington she had been brought up in and ‘life crude &
impertinent’ in the ‘Bloomsbury’ she helped to shape. In ‘Bloomsbury’ it was possible to
mention both ‘copulation’ and W[ater] C[loset]s. Gait, dress, manners, accent even more
than occupation or income were the cultural markers that distinguished ‘them’ from ‘us’.
In Lancashire in the 1930s women were divided into the hatted elite and the wearers of
shawls—a shawl did double service as headgear and coat—and could accommodate a child
in arms too. As a small girl, Phyllis Noble, a Londoner born in 1922, the daughter of a
jobbing builder, recognised her mother’s categories: ‘rough’, ‘respectable’ and ‘posh’. As
her son Alan (born 1934) recalled, Lilian Bennett, a Leeds butcher’s wife, pigeonholed her
acquaintances as ‘better off’, ‘well off’, ‘refined’, ‘educated’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘common’. In
the 1950s the Yorkshire broadcaster Wilfred Pickles (born 1904) contrasted ‘good
neighbourly fowk’ with ‘stuck-up fowk’. The examples of ‘People Like Us’ and, even more,
of the people ‘we’ aspired to resemble were prime influences on conduct. The thumbnail
sketch of Rosamond Lehmann (born 1901) that appeared in the Penguin edition of her
novel Dusty Answer in 1936 ex uded glamour.
Her father was a Member of Parliament, a contributor to Punch, and also known as
one of the best oarsmen in England. She is the wife of a well-known painter [Wogan
Philipps], they spend much of their time in Wales, or in a country place not far from
Oxford, he busy with his painting, she with her writing.
To Mrs Forster, a working man’s wife living in Carlisle, the kind of life led by Mrs Dale,
the suburban doctor’s wife who shared her Diary with listeners in the 1940s and 1950s,
was ideal.
By investing in a suitable nanny, a prep and public school education, wealthy parents
could buy ‘a little upper-middle-class child’. The grammar schools, paler imitations of
public schools brought into the state system in the 1940s, ‘learn[ed]’ their pupils ‘to be
snobs’, to quote a Yorkshire father’s bitter verdict. Oxford or Cambridge could complete