Hello and welcome to Voices of Postwar England. This website focuses on the history of the working class in England since 1945. In particular, it showcases the life history of working-class people in Liverpool and Coventry since 1945. As it grows, we’ll include links and material of interest to people wanting to research their family history, labour history or social history. Explore the site to learn more about life in England in the 1950s and 1960s and how it compares with today.

Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President in the USA Election Campaign, recently described herself as working-class. This has raised fresh debate about the definition and lifestyle of the ‘working class’. Check our list of links (blogroll, righthand column) that now include bloggers debating these issues around the world. We don’t agree with all the views expressed, but we hope you’ll find them food for thought.

The following selection of images accompanied a small photographic exhibition of postwar life in Coventry and Liverpool. These images evoke a sense of home life and different views of postwar council housing. Click on the image to see a larger picture. If you can add information about the housing estates in Coventry that would be great!

Oral history narrators John McGuirk and Dolly Lloyd

In a cavernous cellar, with radical undertones, off a bustling Liverpool street earlier this week a group of Coventrians and Liverpudlians met to celebrate their postwar histories and memories.

It was with great pleasure that Selina Todd and myself welcomed everyone to the News From Nowhere radical bookshop to celebrate the completion of the oral history projects, Coventry and Liverpool Lives, following two years of interviewing in both cities: twenty-two people interviewed; thousands of words spoken and a wealth of memories sparked. As the oral historian on this project I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting everyone involved and it was a great privilege to be invited to listen to everyone’s personal life histories.

People have lots of questions when you approach them to take part in an oral history project:”Why do you want to speak to me? What can I tell you? What will you ask me? What is it going to be used for? Who else are you talking to?” And as the interviewing is underway people often ask “What have the other interviewees said?”

These questions are important. The key to being an oral historian is that you must answer these questions honestly and provide as much information as possible to put the narrator at ease. At the same time you must encourage and create a comfortable atmosphere for the narrator to continue to tell the story they want to tell. Although the oral historian is the person with the questions, the person who turns the recorder on and makes sure it is working, the person who is most important is the narrator. Without the oral history narrators’ enthusiasm, time and memories this project would not have been the success it is. The collection is a rich source of material which will be a valuable resource for future researchers. At the Liverpool gathering answers to these questions will hopefully have become more apparent. The interviewees were able to meet each other and through this website they can finally hear segments of what the other narrators said.

Together this collection contributes significantly to our understanding and knowledge of post-war everyday life. It fills a gap in sources of the period by focusing on Coventry and Liverpool, two cities that were integral to British post-war reconstruction. Historians’ attention is shifting from the London centric image of the swinging sixties to consider more regional and local experiences. This collection will make a significant contribution to this new direction in British history. As a collective archive they cover people’s experiences of growing up, working, married and later life from the 1920s, through the 1980s to the time of interviewing in 2008.

Although a collective experience of a period or event is crucial what is important about this collection of oral histories is that they are full individual life histories. No two life histories are the same. Each is unique. Personal accounts and memories of often not spoken about topics are detailed. You may have lived on a street with fifteen other families and some of those families may have been related to you but your memories of the support networks, family get togethers, births and deaths belong to you and are shaped by your perspective of the events. Well told stories sit alongside those that had been forgotten and are slowly pieced back together.

This collection is a rich resource. Thank you to all oral history narrators for your time, enthusiasm, encouragement and memories.

Hilary

Polly Toynbee contributes to the contemporary debate in her Guardian column about whether we are living in a classless society or not. Despite assertions that we are living in a classless society Toynbee argues that class is still used by both the left and the right to gain political clout. By denying the continued significance of class, Toynbee suggests we are denying people’s ability to identify themselves as working class.

BBC Radio 4’s Archive Hour on Saturday 30th presented a programme on Liverpool’s turbulent social and cultural history throughout the twentieth century, Liverpool: Sinner and Saint. Throughout the programme archived sources including folk songs written and performed by Liverpudlians about the Toxteth riots of the early eighties can be heard alongside people’s memories and feelings about being moved from the inner city to the outer lying estates such as Huyton. The current debate around culture and its uses and how Liverpool has tried to ensure Liverpool 08’s success will continue to deliver cultural engagement after the affair are discussed throughout. The programme will be available to listen to again on the BBC Radio 4 website at the above link for another couple of days.

The press release for the oral history project in Coventry in Spring 2007 attracted a phenomenal number of replies from people born in Coventry; people who moved there in the initial postwar period as children with their families or as young adults to find work or who had found love during the war and were following their heart; people who no longer live in the City but live in other areas of the country or live abroad now, also got in touch. Thank you! We were unable to interview everyone but we hope that this site and blog will be of interest to you. You are very welcome to comment on any of the content and include your own memories of living in and working in Coventry.

The picture of the Locarno Ballroom included in the Coventry Evening Telegraph prompted Alan Watkins to get in touch. He was able to identify himself and his then girlfriend, now wife, Veronica, celebrating New Year’s Eve in the Locarno c. 1960s.

Thanks to the ESRC and the Economic History Society for generously funding this event

]]> http://voicesofpostwarengland.com/2008/07/08/class-in-modern-britain-symposium-manchester-10th-and-11th-july-2008/feed/ http://voicesofpostwarengland.com/2008/07/01/liverpool-overhead-railway/ http://voicesofpostwarengland.com/2008/07/01/liverpool-overhead-railway/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:32:14 +0000 hilaryyoung http://voicesofpostwarengland.com/?p=76

The Liverpool Overhead Railway has a prominent place in people’s memories about the city.  It ran the length of the docks and was the daily transport for many to work. “Take a trip” on the overhead railway by clicking on this youtube video. To read more about the history of the overhead railway check out this website.

At the end of the Second World War in 1945 Coventry became the focus of an extensive reconstruction plan including a new city centre and a wide network of new housing estates. The city experienced considerable economic growth and social change in the post-war period and was heralded as a ‘phoenix’ rising from the ashes. Since his appointment in 1938 and the extensive bombing of the city in November 1940 the newly appointed city Architect, Donald Gibson, had been ‘looking to the future’ of Coventry’s urban planning. He recruited a team of assistant architects and surveyors, the Re-development Committee, initially to alleviate immediate housing needs due to the flourishing car and machine tool industries which attracted a large migrant workforce. While designing the new housing Gibson and his team also worked out a scheme for a new civic centre as a whole. The Council felt that the city lacked the cultural, social and educational buildings appropriate to a thriving industrial city. There was no theatre, central library, art gallery or public baths; it needed new civic offices and law courts and a new building for the school of art.

The modernity project that the city and the working-class people of Coventry were a part of in the mid-twentieth century created a space for constructing a new future and possibly new identities. The Coventry Evening Telegraph recognised in 1945 that “No Government alone could make Coventry prosperous. The good life would only be possible to the extent it was lived and worked for by the ordinary men and women of Coventry.”

The redevelopment of the city in the late 1940s and 1950s was of central concern to the planners, councillors and central government as it was thought to reflect the country’s wider recovery after the war and ultimately result in a ‘Better Britain.’ The rebuilding and planning of Coventry has tended to be told through the planners, architects and local government’s perspective. The oral history gathered for this project tells a different story of the reconstruction of Coventry in the postwar period as people remember going to school, playing on the bomb sites, and moving into newly built homes to accommodate those living in slum conditions or those who had no housing at all.

The image above is the front cover of a special edition of Architectural Design dedicated to the redevelopment of the city (December 1958). By the time this special edition was published the original city architect. Donald Gibson, had left the project and Arthur Ling had taken over. The edition included an extended essay by Ling called ‘Looking to the future’ about his own personal views of what Coventry could expect in terms of housing and a new city centre.