Social history musings

[inulro]

I am, at long last, nearly finished reading Peter Ackroyd's London. I've been paying particular attention to the parts about the East End.

My interest in the East End started when I was doing my PhD and reading a lot on the Empire and the making of British cultural identity. I was struck by the fact that a the Empire's economy depended on there being too many workers to do the work at the docks unloading the spoils of empire and thus wages were kept low (see also: Liverpool), along with some cultural studies twaddle concerning the theory of This, That and the Other (or how the Powers that Be used the oppressed at home to oppress the natives elsewhere).

Anyhoo, Ackroyd doesn't tell me a lot that I didn't already know, though he distills disparate things nicely. And he has a beautiful conclusion:

So the aspiration towards civic contentment has led to a dimunition of local identity. The greatest contrast of all, evinced in photographs taken from 1890 to 1990, lives in the diminution of people in the streets. The life of the East End has gone within. Whether the telephone or television has effected this change is not the question; the salient fact remains that the human life of the streets has greatly diminished in exhberance and in intensity. Yet it is important not to sentimentalise this transtion. If the east seems a more denuded place, it is also a less impoverished one; if it is more remote, or less human, it is also healthier. No one would willingly exchange a council flat for a tenement slum, even if the slums were filled with a communal spirit. You cannot go back.

I may be a historian of poverty, and probably because rather than in spite of it, I never romanticise it. Some time ago I started to write about Gilda O'Neil's My East End, which was full of older East Enders doing precisely that. They complain about how the new estates they got housed in had no sense of community because they weren't housed together with people from their old "turning". However, they were housed with other East Enders who presumably had a similar background, but making the effort to get to know people they hadn't known since birth was too much, and they chose isolation and moaning about how there was no community any more, & reminiscing about how great the pre-war way of life was. I got really tired of reading "we had no money but we made our own entertainment". Didn't everyone in those days? Certainly coming from a rural prairie background everyone did. The other thing that terminally annoyed me was that violence is never mentioned in that book. No, no crime in the good old East End. (Conversely, it saved me from reading about how the Krays loved their mum, because damaging library books is a Bad Thing).

Something else to follow up: Ackroyd writes how the topology of the suffragette movement and the East End has been inadequately analysed. That would make for a good article I could likely sell, if I ever find the time. So would the comparison to Liverpool, if that hasn't already been done. I suspect that just because I only just noticed, doesn't mean it hasn't been obvious to someone else for a very long time.

Comments

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

Don't suppose you know anything about adoption in the East End, do you? My grandfather and his siblings were put into a childrens' home, and it seems a bit awful to ask him if he ever knew why it happened. Do you know if it was a common occurence?

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I don't know a lot about the subject - I know quite a bit about foundling homes in the 18th & 19th century (which were essentially baby death farms).

I do know that up to the 70s, unmarried mothers were often coerced into giving up their babies to children's homes & hopefully adoption, and that some parents did give up entire sibling groups when they could no longer afford to look after them, & this was quite socially acceptable, but that's about it.

Coincidentally, there was a woman on Radio 4 (either Start the Week or Midweek) a couple weeks ago who was one of these adopted children of a single mother. She's written a book that's a combination of her experience finding her birth mother & more generally about the phenomenon of adoption pre-1970s. I made a note to look out for it - it's called Love Child by Sue Elliot. It might be a good starting point.

[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure mine must have had married parents, just because there were several kids and they were old enough to know each other when they were put in the home - the sister was too young to remember, and was taken away from the others to be adopted. My granddad found her by accident - he walked past a house and she was playing in the garden, but she'd forgotten her brothers.

Granddad almost certainly knows all the details, I just don't want to upset him by asking! He'd have looked into it himself if he'd thought it important, I guess,