Family and kinship in East London, Michael Young and Peter Willmott's classic 1957 sociological study of life in Bethnal Green and Debden (the post-war outer suburban council estate they called ‘Greenleigh’) probably represents the most influential account of what came to be conceptualized, at around this time, as ‘traditional’ working-class culture.Footnote 1 Michael Young is sometimes presented as the first social investigator to go into the field with a strong a priori conception of working-class urban neighbourhoods as cohesive, culturally rich ‘communities’ with their own value systems.Footnote 2 This is to overstate the case. This had also been the central message of prominent Edwardian social investigators, many of whom can be read (unlike Young), as emotionally ‘tory’ in the sense that they articulated the fear that ill-judged social reforms could destabilize the social order by somehow ‘spoiling’ the working classes.Footnote 3
But, if Family and kinship built on an established British tradition of ethnographically sensitive social investigation, it nonetheless still represented a landmark study. It was important for the way in which it wove together the insights of anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and for its sustained engagement with the testimony of people whose lives were being re-engineered by post-war governments committed to large-scale slum clearance and the dispersal of population from the over-crowded inner cities (so-called ‘overspill’ policy).Footnote 4 But most of all, it was important for cementing a powerful vision of a supposedly ‘traditional’ working-class social and cultural system said to be on the brink of dissolution. As the first substantial output of the Institute of Community Studies (ICS) which Willmott and Young had established in Bethnal Green three years earlier, it was in many respects the definitive statement about class as community in post-war Britain.Footnote 5 Reinforced by Richard Hoggart's pioneering study of urban popular culture, The uses of literacy, which was also published in 1957, and by the wider explosion of interest in working-class life captured in literature and film (a moment recently conveyed with brilliance by Selina Todd), Young and Willmott's account of the impact of post-war rehousing policies on the people of Bethnal Green came to define the concept of ‘working-class community’ in British public debate.Footnote 6
Appearing in a cheap Penguin paperback edition in 1962, Family and kinship would sell more than half a million copies, influencing generations of scholars, social workers, and other professionals.Footnote 7 Howard Newby has described it as ‘arguably the most famous community study of all’; a text ‘on which a whole generation of sociology students was weaned’.Footnote 8 In his history of social research in post-war Britain, Mike Savage sees Family and kinship as a ‘pioneering’ qualitative study which helped to rehabilitate the in-depth interview in social research, while in their review of post-war community studies Graham Crow and Graham Allan describe it as the ‘pre-eminent’ study for fixing ideas about ‘community life in times past’.Footnote 9 Similarly, Jerry White describes it as offering ‘the traditional ideal of a working-class community in inner London’, and even Jennifer Platt, who wrote a scathing critique of the book's ‘impressionistic’ methodology, nonetheless acknowledged that it ‘caught the public imagination’ like no other social survey, creating ‘an atmosphere of excitement about sociology which altered the pattern of many careers’ (including her own).Footnote 10 Urban planners were always more sceptical about the book's pessimistic account of life on the new post-war housing estates, but they nonetheless acknowledged its profound impact on debates about ‘community’.Footnote 11 Probably most sceptical of all were the feminist scholars of the 1970s and 1980s for whom it was, in Ann Oakley's words, the text that ‘gave rise to generations of specious ramblings about kitchen matriarchs’.Footnote 12 Elizabeth Wilson lamented Young and Willmott's creation of the ‘mythical Bethnal Green mum’ and felt ‘the Bethnal Green studies became classics, and managed to impose their myths on the national consciousness. This myth was of the warmth, charm, and humanity of working-class family life.’Footnote 13
Like Hoggart's treatise on popular culture (in which ‘our mam’ was again the pivotal figure), Family and kinship had its origins in its author's critical, if sympathetic, response to the state-directed reforms of the post-war Labour governments. Young had directed the Labour party's research department between 1945 and 1951, and continued to work closely with leading figures in the party who shared his wish for a more pluralist, community-based approach to making socialism.Footnote 14 In 1948, he had written Small man, big world, a passionate plea for the Labour government to recognize the need for ‘neighbourhood democracy’, building on the flowering of community associations and other local popular initiatives during and after the Second World War.Footnote 15 Four years later, in his essay For richer, for poorer, which marked his retirement from Labour office, Young under-scored the centrality of the extended family to the working-class community.Footnote 16 In this sense, the answers were formed long before Young went into the field to ask his questions.
Peter Willmott was eight years younger than Young and had enjoyed a less privileged upbringing. Young was from a bohemian middle-class family and had been educated at Dartington Hall and the London School of Economics (LSE). Willmott's father was a bus driver, and though he won a place at grammar school he went on to study for an apprenticeship in engineering rather than a university degree. Inspired by the arguments of Small man, big world, Willmott came to work as Young's research assistant at the Labour party in 1949. Politically they shared a common vision, and five years later, in 1954, they jointly set up the Institute of Community Studies to pioneer a new type of grounded social research that would feed directly into current policy debates.Footnote 17
In Family and kinship, Young and Willmott argued that the British authorities had failed to recognize working-class people's powerful attachment to place, and to the dense networks of kinship and neighbourliness built up over preceding generations, which they saw as the building blocks for a more mutualistic socialism. They famously insisted that ‘very few people wish to leave the East End. They are attached to Mum and Dad, to the markets, to the pubs and settlements.’Footnote 18 According to Young and Willmott, the great post-war schemes to tackle urban over-crowding and slum housing failed to recognize these powerful attachments, relying too heavily on so-called ‘overspill’ developments which saw hundreds of thousands of people relocated many miles from family and friends. They insisted that the only reason many agreed to being relocated to London's outer suburban housing estates such as Hainault and Debden, or to new towns such as Stevenage and Harlow even further away, was that they were offered no other way to secure a decent, modern home for their families. The political vision at the heart of Family and kinship was compelling: Labour needed to listen more carefully to what people wanted before it sought to plan better lives for them.
When Young began his research, Labour was still in power (just). But when it appeared in print in 1957, the party had been in opposition for six years and many on the Left were beginning to question whether Labour could successfully reconnect with people's everyday lives. In this context, the book's vision of working-class ‘community’ was easily historicized; read not as thick description of a way of life that might yet be saved from careless destruction by planners, but instead as an account of inexorable social processes undermining Labour politics by breaking up the party's urban working-class heartlands. Young and Willmott were more sanguine about organic change from within, including the decline of customary naming practices within families and evidence that fathers were taking a more active interest in their children.Footnote 19 What they feared was change from without which threatened to disrupt the social relationships that gave cohesion and meaning to people's lives. But the subtleties of their position were largely missed in the fevered debates of the late 1950s about ‘affluence’ and the supposed crisis of Labour politics.Footnote 20 It was not Young and Willmott, but social scientists influenced by these wider controversies, who used their work to construct a model of the ‘traditional working-class community’. In 1965, Josephine Klein mined Family and kinship for her influential arguments about the nature of ‘traditional working-class life’. In turn, John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood mobilized Klein's model in their massively influential study of the difference between ‘traditional’ workers and supposedly new ‘affluent’ workers.Footnote 21
Young and Willmott's findings therefore played a central role in the construction of this model of the (disappearing) ‘traditional’ working-class community. In the introduction to Family and kinship, Young and Willmott professed to be surprised to have found that ‘the wider family, far from having disappeared, was still very much alive in the middle of London’.Footnote 22 Mapping the contours of this family system, and particularly the central role of mothers within it, underpinned their argument that post-war housing policies threatened to undermine a healthy, functioning way of life. From the outset, some wondered if the authors’ powerful a priori commitment to the ideal of working-class ‘community’ may have coloured their arguments.Footnote 23 In the foreword to the first edition, Richard Titmuss described the study as ‘selective rather than comprehensive’ with an ‘impressionistic flavour’, though he suggested that these faults were ‘more than balanced by the warmth and vividness in the main body of the work’.Footnote 24 As early as 1960, Margaret Stacey was pointing out that ‘the close mother–daughter relationship, described as so strongly typical of Bethnal Green’ did not function in at least 40 per cent of cases due to death, removal, or permanent schism.Footnote 25 Most famously, in 1971, Jennifer Platt offered a book-length critique of the ICS and its ‘impressionistic’ methods, in which she argued that Family and kinship had constructed ‘an ideal-type Bethnal Green family rather than a typology’ capable of explaining their supposedly ‘deviant cases’.Footnote 26 Most strikingly of all, in the early 1980s, Jocelyn Cornwell argued, on the basis of conducting her own intensive anthropological study of Bethnal Green, that Young and Willmott appeared to have captured only the reassuring ‘public accounts’ of community which people reproduce almost as clichés. Their methods, she suggested, had not allowed them to tap into the more personal ‘private accounts’ in which enmity, snobbery, and plain indifference towards neighbours point to the limits of ‘community’ in people's daily lives.Footnote 27
In recent decades, historians have also sought to puncture romanticized accounts of working-class community, building on Robert Roberts's pioneering semi-autobiographical treatise The classic slum (1971).Footnote 28 But, until recently, few questioned the idea that a distinctive urban culture rooted in class and place – a whole way of living – was torn apart in Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, this remained a central premise of Roberts's own anti-romantic account of life in the classic slum; at the book's opening, surveying the flattened streets of 1960s Salford, he comments ‘A kind of culture unlikely to rise again had gone in the rubble.’Footnote 29 Many classic post-war social histories also work with a cataclysmic model of social and cultural change, often citing the work of Young and Hoggart as evidence of the world that was lost.Footnote 30 Only recently have historians begun to eschew this narrative of ‘rise and fall’ in favour of more subtle accounts of the reworking of class identities and practices since the war.Footnote 31
It is probably the powerful personal testimony mobilized throughout Family and kinship which helps to explain why Young and Willmott's celebratory account of working-class community has proved so influential, and has come to represent the classic account of ‘traditional’ working-class life before ‘affluence’ and mass consumption supposedly changed everything. Until now, it has been impossible to assess the status of these testimonies – did most people they spoke to see the world as Young and Willmott suggest, or as critics suggested did they highlight only those voices which echoed their powerful a priori thesis? Thanks to recent deposits of materials found at the ICS in the 1990s, we now have a sizeable chunk of the project's original field-notes available for re-analysis.Footnote 32 In all, files relating to half the Bethnal Green cases from Young's 1955 Ph.D. thesis survive, along with notes from twelve of the forty-seven couples who had relocated from Bethnal Green to Debden (these were interviewed in 1953 and, in most cases, again in 1955).Footnote 33 The survival of these notes appears to have been pure chance – for Bethnal Green we have three large files containing twenty-five cases in a continuous numbered series.Footnote 34 In most cases, we have both Young's rough notes scribbled in the field and his typed reports of the interviews. We find snippets of recorded speech in the field-notes, but more often Young's notes paraphrase respondents’ testimony. It is clear that the longer extracts of recorded speech found in the reports, and in Young's subsequent publications, generally represent reconstructions of vernacular speech rather than verbatim testimony. This is itself an interesting insight into Young's method, but the field-notes also offer us rich insights into life in post-war Bethnal Green: insights which often complicate the account of working-class community advanced in Family and kinship.Footnote 35
Many of the testimonies surviving in Young's field-notes run sharply counter to the book's powerful narrative about the relationship between kinship and community cohesion. They frequently show respondents grappling with the tensions between Cornwell's private and public accounts of ‘community’; between life as it was lived, and life as people felt it should be lived. The discussion that follows focuses on the three dimensions of residents’ testimony that speak most directly to Family and kinship's core thesis about community: relations with neighbours, relations with kin, and attitudes to Bethnal Green itself as a place to live. Attitudes towards neighbours, neighbourhood, and kinsfolk were all more equivocal than Young and Willmott suggest. People registered the normative culture which valorized both family and locality as key markers of belonging, but were happy to talk openly about personal feelings which placed them at odds with these values. Talk about neighbours was less emotionally charged; most displayed the same wariness and distance that Young and Willmott suggested was characteristic of migrants to Debden. The final section looks in detail at the surviving Debden interviews. In many key respects, residents’ attitudes were strikingly similar to those expressed by people who had chosen to stay put in Bethnal Green. A surprising number actually welcomed the chance to be more distant from their close kin, while, even among those who missed their kinsfolk, few had any wish to return to the crowded streets of Bethnal Green. Arguably, such voices went almost unheard in Family and kinship because they challenged the authors’ model of the extended family as lynchpin of an organic, self-servicing working-class community – a community which they hoped might yet provide the basis for an alternative, less Statist, model for British social democracy. But filtering out these voices created a myth of working-class community which has too often stood in the way of understanding the extent to which working people played an active role in remaking their own lives in the decades after the Second World War. Returning to their original testimony is one way to correct this distorting influence, and restore some measure of agency to their lives.
I
Intriguingly, both in his Ph.D. thesis and in Family and kinship, Young observed that he had not managed systematically to investigate the question of neighbour, as opposed to kin, relations.Footnote 36 This appears to be only partially true. In his Ph.D., Young mentions conducting fourteen interviews with ‘contiguous people in each of two streets, in order to inquire into the influence of neighbours as compared with relatives’.Footnote 37 Nothing is said about the findings of this research either in his thesis or in the subsequent book and the transcripts have not survived. However, the surviving field-notes from the 1953 interviews include plenty of cases where respondents spontaneously shared their thoughts about neighbours, and time and again their comments destabilize the arguments advanced in Family and kinship because they suggest very little difference in attitudes to neighbours between Bethnal Green and Debden. Young and Willmott argued that long-term residence and dense family networks helped promote friendly relations with non-kin by increasing people's range of acquaintances.Footnote 38 They acknowledged that neighbours rarely visited each other – the home was a private space reserved for the family – but they insisted that ‘This exclusiveness in the home runs alongside an attitude of friendliness to other people living in the street. Quite often people have themselves lived there for a long time.’Footnote 39 Oddly, they then quoted a man who felt much less positive about the situation: ‘they're all related in the street’, he complained, ‘It's awful, you can't talk to anyone in the street about any of the others, but you find it's a relation. You have to be very careful.’ Playing down the potential tyranny of propinquity, they merely commented: ‘if he is careful and keeps on good terms with his neighbours, he is also on good terms with their relatives’.Footnote 40
But if this man was a lone, unheeded voice in Family and kinship, his fears find many echoes in the surviving interviews. Out of fourteen families who made some comment about neighbours, nine were either openly hostile or wary, while two more lamented that people were not as friendly as they used to be; only three had anything positive to say about neighbours. Mrs Quail was typical of those who were wary. She told Young that she did not like to ‘mix up with neighbours’ and would never borrow from them; Mrs Whiteside was even more emphatic, proclaiming: ‘I don't like making friends with anybody. I don't mix up with the neighbours’ (it was evidently a local saying).Footnote 41 Mrs Instone, a box-maker's wife, was one of those who felt that neighbourliness was in decline. She told Young that ‘People in [the] East End seem to keep more apart than they used to; young married couples keep to themselves.’ But at the same time, she acknowledged her own unease with judgemental neighbours by complaining that she chose to hide her interest in ballet, fine art, and foreign cuisines for fear of being thought ‘snobbish’.Footnote 42 While such comments undoubtedly suggest the performance of ‘respectability’ was important in these cross-class exchanges, they also underline that relations with neighbours were socially charged and potentially volatile.Footnote 43 The most extreme case of alienation from neighbours was a family who portrayed themselves as completely cut off from the residents in their ‘turning’. They told Young that they had refused to go to the local coronation street party because neighbours had been throwing things at their children in the street.Footnote 44 Here the warmth and camaraderie that characterized Young and Willmott's vision of working-class community was wholly absent.
But perhaps most suggestive is Young's response to Mrs Kimber when she told him that ‘she wouldn't be afraid of being cut off from people’ if she moved out to one of the new estates because one was ‘better off if you keep yourself to yourself’: Young simply scribbled in the margin: ‘Again!’ But if this maxim registered as a cliché of Bethnal Green mores in the summer of 1953, it was not to be acknowledged in Family and kinship. Here, it was only the new suburbanites at Debden who were said to believe in ‘keeping themselves to themselves’ (the title of the second Debden chapter). The isolation of suburban life, Young and Willmott argued, bred suspicion and alienation among people who had been naturally gregarious in the familiar surroundings of their old neighbourhoods.Footnote 45 This was a view he had already expressed in his 1952 treatise on ‘family, community and socialism’ For richer, for poorer, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Young simply reverted to his a priori assumptions about urban ‘community’ and suburban anomie when the fieldwork in Bethnal Green was over.Footnote 46
Young's field-notes also demonstrate that the widespread preference for houses over flats, which is noted in Family and kinship, was directly related to the strains that often characterized neighbourly relations in Bethnal Green. Some respondents simply objected to the loss of privacy that came with communal living, such as the man who complained ‘It was like being in a Home. You could hear people getting up at night’, and the woman who said ‘The flat itself is alright. It's having people underneath, overhead and sideways. You're never on your own.’Footnote 47 But others focused more explicitly on conflict with neighbours. Mrs Heal cited the difficulties that could arise over shared responsibility for communal areas, and a number of residents mentioned the danger of arguments over noise levels.Footnote 48 Among the ex-Bethnal Greeners at Debden, such comments were even more numerous; they had, after all, chosen a suburban house in preference to the only alternative on offer to families living in sub-standard housing in the 1940s and 1950s: a central London council flat.Footnote 49 There were a few dissenting voices in Bethnal Green, but only from people who had always lived in flats: one man declared that there was ‘nothing wrong with them. Don't mind the noise’, and another commented pragmatically that they were fine if it meant you could continue to live centrally.Footnote 50 But even these respondents could not be said to have celebrated the joys of neighbourliness and communal living.
In short, whilst we only get fleeting insights into neighbouring from the surviving interviews, because Young and Willmott never systematically studied the issue, what we do learn suggests that Family and kinship drew a rather idealized picture of communal relations, ignoring strong evidence that many Londoners had always lived by the maxim that it was best to ‘keep themselves to themselves’, in Bethnal Green as much as Debden. This was not something that people had to learn on moving out to a new suburban estate where everyone was a stranger, they already knew, in Young and Willmott's phrase about Debden, that the best way to maintain ‘good’ neighbourly relations was to be ‘wary, though polite’.Footnote 51 Many contemporary social inquiries argued that popular taboos around intimacy with neighbours were much stronger than Young and Willmott claimed, and it is striking that they appear simply to have discounted the implications of this work in their efforts to draw sharper distinctions between urban and suburban lifestyles.Footnote 52
Interestingly, in a project well known to Young and Willmott, Raymond Firth had recently identified sharp tensions around neighbouring while leading a team of anthropologists from the LSE in an investigation of working-class kinship in another inner-city district: the riverside borough of Bermondsey.Footnote 53 Influenced by wartime accounts of the Blitz and the communitarian social theory of Robert Morrison MacIver, Firth had gone into the field expecting to find that propinquity, reinforced by close kinship ties, would provide the backbone for a strong working-class sense of ‘community’. But, unlike Young, he soon abandoned this hypothesis faced by widespread evidence of fractured, distrustful relations between neighbours. According to Firth, ‘the need for sharing tends to divide and individualize households as much as bring them together’.Footnote 54 In Cornwell's terms, Firth recognized that behind the routinized ‘public accounts’ of community togetherness there were other, more personal ‘private accounts’ that painted a much less rosy picture. Cornwell supposed that Young and Willmott failed to tap into these more discordant accounts, but the surviving field-notes suggest otherwise. They actively chose to foreground the more positive, if mythical, public accounts of ‘community’, probably because these myths underpinned their vision of a less centralist version of post-war social democracy.Footnote 55
II
Firth also highlighted the ways in which people's private accounts often clashed with dominant ideas about the importance of family. He was struck by the frequency of family feuds, and the relatively weak kin relations beyond the nuclear family, concluding that, unlike in ‘traditional’ societies, personal feeling, more than social obligation, governed kin relations.Footnote 56 Young and Willmott, by contrast, drew very different conclusions from their work on Bethnal Green, stressing the centrality of the extended family to all aspects of social and economic life. But again the surviving interview-notes offer plenty of material to support Firth's rather more conditional and limited model of post-war, working-class kinship. Large numbers of Young's Bethnal Green respondents happily confided that they had little to do with some, or even all, of their relatives – even those who lived close by. Mrs Whiteside, the woman who claimed not to like making friends, was again an extreme example telling Young ‘several times’ that ‘she was not one for the family’.Footnote 57
In all, more than two-thirds of the surviving Bethnal Green case-files register some degree of hostility or ambivalence towards kinfolk (seventeen of twenty-five cases). Five had broken off all relations with their kin or were in an open feud with them, nine were distant from most of their relations, and three had fallen out with immediate blood relatives. In only three cases could the respondents be said to be wholly positive about their kinsfolk (two more were mostly positive and in three cases nothing is recorded about attitudes to kin). Many people reported having lost contact with most or all their aunts and uncles, and it was also common to have lost contact with at least some siblings. Indeed, blood feuds with siblings were not uncommon, and two families reported that disputes over inheritance had caused a lasting breach.Footnote 58 There were even cases where parents and their children were no longer speaking, usually as a consequence of marriage breakdowns. One woman declared boldly of her father: ‘He's dead to me because I never see him. He got married again but his new wife didn't want him to come & see us or something.’Footnote 59 A postman reported no longer speaking to his father (or to one of his sisters) because both had responded badly to him marrying a divorced woman with children.Footnote 60 These cases do not suggest that family was unimportant – on the contrary, such feuds reflected the intense emotions that became invested in family once kinship ties were seen as personal and chosen, rather than simply given. But they do suggest that the close-knit, loving, gregarious extended family was normative only in the sense that this became the idealized model of family life in such communities, not the normal way that families actually interacted with each other.
If bitter family feuds were surprisingly common given how little they feature in Family and kinship,Footnote 61 probably more typical were the cases where people had simply drifted apart from relatives, even when those relatives continued to live nearby (Young and Willmott stressed that distance often led to a breakdown in kin relations, but not that they might be weak despite close proximity).Footnote 62 One of the older couples in Young's sample, with no parents surviving to help keep the family together, professed not to know anything about their relatives; the husband told Young they were ‘never a family to cling together like the majority of families’.Footnote 63 But if this man recognized a strong normative culture emphasizing the importance of close family ties, the testimony of others would suggest that he was more typical than he supposed.
Young and Willmott's field-notes are littered with examples where siblings are rarely seen, even though they live nearby.Footnote 64 Mrs Harvey hardly ever saw her sister even though she lived in the next block of flats; Mrs Moody (Young's telling pseudonym) saw nothing of family living nearby in Shoreditch because they were ‘moody and difficult’; and Mr Marsden happily confided that he only saw his relatives if he bumped into them in the street, commenting ‘You get a better welcome then than if you see them every week.’Footnote 65 Indeed, Young's Bethnal Green field-notes sometimes show him registering surprise at his respondents’ open acknowledgement of their indifference to kin. When a woman tells him that she is ‘not much of a one’ for relatives because ‘when you've got 3 children it's rather a handful to take round to other people's homes’, Young inserts an exclamation mark in parentheses after the comment.Footnote 66 And when he subsequently discovers that this woman wants to move out of Bethnal Green, despite being her elderly mother's only child, he explains it as an aberration caused by the older woman having worked throughout the daughter's childhood, leaving her to be brought up by an aunt (John Bowlby's attachment theory is explicitly cited in the Bethnal Green case-notes and was evidently a strong influence on Young's model of the mother/daughter bond).Footnote 67
At times, Young directly challenged residents who appeared not to be living up to his idealized model of their family-centred culture. When one woman told him that they were planning to move out to Dagenham, he asked her directly what would happen to her mother left behind in Bethnal Green. Young records that she retorted ‘rather shortly’: ‘There would be my sisters, wouldn't there?’Footnote 68 He also came across a woman determined to move back to Canvey Island to avoid her demanding daughters. Having originally moved from the Island to Bethnal Green to escape her now dead mother, this woman bluntly told him that:
My daughters come to me with all their troubles – makes me ill – about having no money – or baby-minding, or something of the sort. I say when they're married, they've got to look after themselves. They've made their bed and they've got to lie on it.Footnote 69
But even if such things could be said in 1950s Britain, they could not be heard. In the 1980s, Carolyn Steedman noted that Young and Willmott had failed to recognize the guilt and resentment that could structure apparently close mother/daughter relationships, but she could not have known that some women had found the courage to tell them this at the time, only for their words to be discounted as ‘aberrant’.Footnote 70 The determining influence of Young and Willmott's a priori assumptions about class, community, and gender could hardly be clearer.
III
Interestingly, when it comes to testimony about place, the surviving field-notes are broadly consistent with the framing offered in Family and kinship. The man they quote re-telling his father's memories of Bethnal Green as semi-rural, and citing Defoe as an authority about ancient rights of way, is a local boot maker interviewed as part of the 1953 sample.Footnote 71 But Young also spoke to people with more profoundly personal memories of place. For some, it was about a strong familial connection, as with Mrs Silverman who explained: ‘[I] Don't think I'd like to move out of London. You see all my family's lived here. Mum's always lived in B[ethnal] G[reen] herself. I was bred and born here.’Footnote 72 Particularly poignant was an elderly woman, Mrs Hadrian, who took Young to the balcony of her son's third floor council flat to look down on the landscaped gardens; ‘My house used to be there’, she told him, ‘that's where our home was and Reuben Street ran there.’Footnote 73 This woman's Bethnal Green existed in the mind more than on the ground, but the importance of place to her can hardly be doubted. But of course it wasn't Bethnal Green as a whole that stirred such powerful emotions, but rather the specific neighbourhood of a few well-known streets – streets that in this woman's case now lay buried by redevelopment. This was something that Young first recognized a few weeks after interviewing Mrs Hadrian, when he was surprised to hear a widow describe her daughter's part of Bethnal Green ‘as though it was another town’. It was then that he realized that the borough was ‘divided up into number of separate districts, far distant from each other’, although it was only later that he came to refer to these known, intimate spaces as ‘precincts’ or ‘villages’.Footnote 74
In all, twenty-two of the Bethnal Green interviews include some comment about place, and of these, twelve are explicitly positive, although in four cases only practical advantages of the district are identified. For instance, Mr Quail, who declared himself too poor to move out, also pointed to the shops and pictures as proof that, unlike in the suburbs, there was always ‘somewhere to go around here’.Footnote 75 Similarly, Mr Rushton, a postman, told Young: ‘I don't like quietness. I like a lot of life. That's why I don't want to leave B[ethnal] G[reen].’Footnote 76 Many families stressed that living in Bethnal Green was convenient for work, especially when their job involved an early morning start.Footnote 77 But others were more equivocal about the borough, including the man who paradoxically told Young: ‘I like the atmosphere. I used to live in Hackney – it's just the same. It's a drab atmosphere. It's an old-fashioned paltry borough like Dickens's time.’Footnote 78 Or the man who said: ‘All the children see round here is bricks, smoke & dirt. The only excitement is to go thieve…Every second family is a bad lot. Some M[other]s and F[ather]s don't care whether their children live or die.’ This man wished his children had been able to stay living in the country after evacuation ended, and he was quite clear that he would still move out if he could.Footnote 79
For some, Bethnal Green had already changed so much that there was no longer any reason to stay. As well as those who insisted that community feeling was in decline, some reported that most of their family had already left the borough and felt that they should follow (this was despite the fact that the sample was drawn from the Bethnal Green rather than London County Council (LCC) housing list and, by focusing on households with at least two children under fifteen, also largely excluded the elderly who were most likely to be left behind).Footnote 80 Given that the population of the borough had more than halved since 1931, it is striking that Young and Willmott did not make more of this problem. Mr Sarson, a general labourer with six children, reported that most of his ‘people’ now lived on the LCC overspill estates at Harold Hill and Hainault, and said he would like to follow because their ‘[m]oving cut them off’ in Bethnal Green. Significantly, this was the beleaguered family who claimed active hostility from their neighbours had prevented them from attending the coronation street party.Footnote 81 Ohers told him about the impact of wartime dislocation; not just the heavy bombing, but also the great population upheaval associated with mass war. According to Mr Harvey, the boot maker who told stories of a semi-rural Bethnal Green, ‘War split everything up; there is only one tenant in this block that I remember from early days, they've all moved out, or died, and new ones come in.’Footnote 82 But Family and kinship does not convey this sense of flux running through old as well as new working-class districts in the 1940s and 1950s.
IV
Flux was also a feature of life on the new LCC estate of Debden, fourteen miles from Bethnal Green along the Central Line as it snaked into suburban Essex. Field-notes survive for twenty-seven interviews conducted with twelve couples who had moved from Bethnal Green to Debden (from a total sample of forty-seven couples interviewed in 1953).Footnote 83 In nine cases, we have information from both the 1953 and the 1955 interviews. Whereas the surviving Bethnal Green cases represent a continuous numbered series (from Case 26 to Case 49) the Debden files do not. This raises the possibility that they are not chance survivals, but rather a selected sub-sample. However, all the evidence points towards chance survival.Footnote 84 Crucially, they do not demonstrate any common characteristics, except that all the couples had lived at Debden for at least two years when interviewed in 1953. Many, but not all, were subsequently quoted in Family and kinship.Footnote 85 The numbers involved here are small, and we should be wary about drawing broad conclusions. However, it is possible to draw some interesting comparisons between the testimony of these couples and Young and Willmott's characterization of life in Debden. Interestingly, many of the couples were internally divided over the virtues of life on the Debden estate, but even so few displayed any inclination to return to Bethnal Green. A bare majority, seven, were unequivocally positive about Debden. One woman, recently widowed, intended to move to Islington, where her mother lived, and the other four couples disagreed about whether or not to stay. Only three of twenty-three spouses wanted to return to Bethnal Green, the other malcontents simply wanted to try life in a different new town or suburban estate. In short, whilst the surviving interviews are diverse, they are considerably more positive about Debden and negative about Bethnal Green than one might expect from reading Family and kinship.
That said, some of Young and Willmott's key arguments about the difficulties of life at Debden are borne out by the surviving transcripts. Wives frequently explain their decision to go out to work in terms of feeling lonely and isolated on the new estate (many also cite increased living costs as a motivation).Footnote 86 Similarly, families frequently complain that expensive train and bus fares mean they no longer see as much of relatives left behind, and for some this is clearly a disappointment.Footnote 87 But, as with the Bethnal Green files, on other points about life at Debden it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Young and Willmott quarried their subjects’ testimony selectively to bolster pre-existing ideas about working-class ‘community’ and its undoing in the supposedly atomized world of the new suburban estates.
According to Young and Willmott, ‘the migrants [to Debden] did not have weaker kinship attachments than other people’ before they left. They support this claim by stating that on average migrants reported having seen their mothers just as often when they lived in Bethnal Green as those still resident there.Footnote 88 They mention that ‘two of the wives admitted to relief at escaping from the coils of kinship’, thereby implying that the other 39 did not feel like this. Like Bethnal Green's ‘bad’ mothers, these women are explicitly labelled ‘exceptional’.Footnote 89 But in fact, among the surviving Debden transcripts, a majority of couples reported weak or non-existent relations with immediate kin while still living in Bethnal Green, and, crucially, portrayed themselves as welcoming the chance to start new lives somewhere else. In only one third of cases did both husband and wife report strong kinship attachments (and only two of these couples now found distance made it difficult to maintain contact with kin). Hardly anyone had access to private transport, and those with large families found train fares prohibitive, but, when ties were close, people's relatives often came to them.Footnote 90 One woman, who had herself broken from her family, told Young that ‘At week-ends a great many people visit their relatives: arriving with baskets of food and stuff, almost like visiting day in hospital.’Footnote 91 Others were happy to see much less of kinsfolk. One man bluntly told Young that moving to Debden had not changed his relationship with his family because ‘He saw as little of them as possible when he lived in Bethnal Green.’Footnote 92 Another man commented that ‘There's never been a lot of love lost between us, because we've never had a good family life. Even as youngsters we never went round together. I don't miss my brothers and sisters.’Footnote 93 Women often expressed similar sentiments. Mrs Rawson told Young that she ‘saw very little of [her] own family’, but felt close to her husband's father because ‘he's always treated me with respect’.Footnote 94 In short, for the majority of couples in the surviving Debden sub-sample, weak blood ties do appear to have made it easier to choose to move out of central London. By treating such families as ‘exceptional’, Young and Willmott radically underestimated the role of choice in post-war population movements, as well as exaggerating the hold of kinship bonds.
It is also striking that ‘Mr Prince’, the person quoted in Family and kinship saying: ‘The neighbours round here are [all] very quiet. They all keep themselves to themselves…They all come from the East End, but they all seem to change when they come down here’, was in fact not part of the sample at all, but rather the Princes’ grown-up son, George.Footnote 95 Perhaps, more pointedly, neither he nor his parents had any wish to return to Bethnal Green. Indeed, during this first exchange, Prince junior made this quite clear, telling Young that, if he married, he too would choose to live at Debden rather than back in the East End.Footnote 96 Indeed, his mother claimed to like Debden precisely because it was quieter than Bethnal Green, telling Young ‘We like it here. We've always lived quiet. The only thing we do miss is the relations.’Footnote 97 A week after the first encounter, George repeated his acerbic observations about Debden residents, this time declaring ‘they all keep themselves to themselves and go their own way’. But the context here was all important – he was speaking immediately after his mother had complained about her sister, ‘one of those moody sorts’, who never came to see them even though she too lived in Debden. George went on to say: ‘In Bethnal Green we had aunts all round the corner. We used to see them everyday.’ Arguably, his bold sociological pronouncements about life at Debden should not have been taken at face value; Prince was using sweeping generalizations about the estate to voice much more personal feelings about a close relative who had hurt his mother.Footnote 98
Like Mrs Prince, many of the migrants welcomed the chance to escape intrusive forms of neighbouring on moving to Debden. Indeed, this is surely what we would expect given the attitudes to neighbours found within the surviving Bethnal Green transcripts. Young and Willmott acknowledged such feelings, but again insisted that they were the exception. They wrote,
A few, like Mrs Painswick, actually welcome seclusion. She had been more averse to the quarrels amongst the ‘rowdy, shouty’ Bethnal Greeners than appreciative of the mateyness to which quarrels are the counterpart, and finds the less intense life of Greenleigh [Debden] a pleasant contrast. ‘In London people had more squabbles. We haven't seen neighbours out here having words.’Footnote 99
This reference to ‘mateyness’ conjures up images of male bonding which perhaps hint at the gendered undertones of Young and Willmott's idealized working-class ‘community’. But there are other problems with this passage. Although Mrs Painswick made the final comment, it was another woman, Mrs Minton, who was pleased that her neighbours were not ‘rowdy’ or ‘shouty’. In fact, what she said, in answer to Young's question about social contacts, was: ‘Friends? No we don't make a habit of that. No we don't go in for that at all. We like to avoid trouble. The neighbours round this way do seem a nice lot. Not a rowdy, shouty, rough lot.’Footnote 100 But again this testimony needs to be read in context. On another occasion, Mrs Minton told Young:
They [their neighbours] would help us if necessary. They come sometimes to borrow things – like it might be a drop of vinegar on a Sunday, or to change two sixpences for a shilling for the electric. Haven't much time for them because with 6 children you've got to keep at the house all the time or things do go down.Footnote 101
It is hard to imagine that she would have felt any differently if her large family had still been living in over-crowded accommodation in Bethnal Green, but that is the central proposition advanced in Family and kinship: that the move out to Debden had caused a fundamental shift in working-class lifestyle and culture ‘from a people-centred to a house-centred existence’, or, in another of their resonant phrases, to a world where ‘relations are window to window, not face-to-face’.Footnote 102
Willmott and Young also argue that a clear majority of Debden couples found people on the estate to be ‘unfriendly’. They report twenty-three couples taking this view, with ten finding them friendly, and eight undecided.Footnote 103 According to Family and kinship, this was asked as a supplementary question, but if so no answers survive with the remaining files, making it hard to evaluate their finding.Footnote 104 However, the surviving field-notes do include cases that fit Young and Willmott's thesis, most notably Mrs Prince (again), who told Young in 1953:
Some people down here have got big-heads. [They're] standoffish. Its only next door that we speak to now. The rest ignore us and we ignore them now. [It was different in BG]. They were properly neighbourly there. They'd stop and speak to you in the street. They'd always got a smile for you.Footnote 105
Similarly, Mrs Maggs, who had lived at Debden for three years, told Young,
We don't even know who lives opposite. We only know two couples on the whole estate by name. We say ‘good morning’ to many of them – but we don't know them from Adam. We didn't know that the husband of the woman opposite had died until we saw it in the local paper.Footnote 106
But this was a family that proclaimed themselves to be ‘just lodging’ in Debden; they still called Bethnal Green ‘down home’ and continued to send their children to school in the borough.Footnote 107 It would be wrong to call these two families ‘exceptional’, but nor were they as ‘typical’ as Family and kinship suggests. Only one other case could be said to fit their model of suburban anomie: Mrs Ruck, the woman who had just been widowed. But as Willmott himself sagely noted, whilst she might lambast her neighbours as uncaring (‘not a bugger spoke to me’), the fact that one of them was there consoling her when he arrived suggested that her comments should not be taken literally.Footnote 108 Her situation really was exceptional, and the fact that she was in the process of moving to live near her mother (in Islington, not Bethnal Green) reminds us that the family networks Young so cherished could indeed still be vital when people faced genuine personal crises.
Interestingly, there are many cases in which people report explicitly positive experiences of their new neighbours at Debden. The Damsons provide an interesting case. In his notes on the family, Young writes: ‘Excellent relations with neighbours. Have made real friends with their contemporaries. No apparent fear of my seeing into their home or their family life.’Footnote 109 While he was there, two neighbours dropped in, and he was struck by the easy informality of their interactions – Mrs Damson tells her friend to ‘put the kettle on’ while the woman's husband ‘set about cleaning the [Damsons’] oil stove as if it were his own house. If these had been siblings of the [Damsons] they could not have been more at ease in [their] house.’Footnote 110 Mrs Damson described her neighbours as ‘pleasant’ and noted that although ‘[a]t night they shut their doors and all retire in to their homes, [during] the day they are all friendly’. The mother of young children, she appears to have found it relatively easy to make connections with other young mothers.Footnote 111 Additionally, her husband was a disabled ex-serviceman who people liked to help (for instance, the man next door parked his mobility car every evening).Footnote 112 Neighbouring came naturally for the Damsons, so much so that ‘they just could not understand it’ when Young told them that ‘there were people on the estate who did not like it [the estate] and felt cut off’.Footnote 113 Their shared home-centred social life might be very different to the ‘mateyness’ of Bethnal Green street life, but Young's notes suggest that in the field, if not in print, he too recognized this as a form of ‘community’. When he revisited them in 1955, Young noted that they had recently had seventeen or eighteen friends from Debden and London round for a party to celebrate their new child's christening, and ‘drank his health in champagne’.Footnote 114
In Family and kinship, Young and Willmott argued that ‘bitterness’, rather than ‘a tacit agreement to live and let live’, tended to dominate personal relationships in Debden because acute social isolation bred status anxieties.Footnote 115 But migrants were often much more adaptive than this suggests, and one of the surviving case-files offers striking insights into how people from radically different backgrounds could improvise a modus vivendi. Mrs Barnes was an Oxford English graduate who, in contemporary parlance, had ‘married down’ for love. Described as displaying an ‘overlay of progressiveness and bohemianism’, she openly acknowledged that it had been ‘a struggle’ to gain her neighbours’ acceptance, partly because of ‘the difference in class’, but also, more specifically, because, as she put it, she was not considered sufficiently ‘houseproud’ (she happily admitted that she would ‘rather be on a typewriter’ than doing the housework).Footnote 116 In 1953, she mentioned that the neighbours complained that she did not keep her house and her curtains ‘spotless’ – that is that she ignored their symbolic public markers of ‘respectability’. But she nonetheless considered them ‘friendly’, explaining that ‘[t]he children bring people together’.Footnote 117 When Young returned two years later, she had recently had another child, and was positive about the support she had received from neighbours: ‘people are very good, and we all muck in together along here’. Interestingly, she also told him that the neighbours now ‘do [the] doorstep for me’ (i.e. scrubbed and possibly whitened the step; one of the principal markers of ‘respectability’ in older working-class neighbourhoods, but evidently also still important to most families who had moved out to Debden).Footnote 118 We cannot know how happily they did this, of course, but we can say that this clash of lifestyle and cultures was being actively negotiated, rather than simply festering in mutual enmity.
It is also striking that the surviving interviews offer almost no support to Young and Willmott's argument that life on the new estate bred bitter status rivalry over material possessions. When people talked about wanting a television, or about the joys of having one, they focused on the practical advantages of cheap entertainment in a district with no cinema and only one pub. In Family and kinship, they describe how one family of seven, the Mintons, were found ‘paraded around it [the television] in a half circle at 9 p.m.’ as though involved in ‘a strange ritual’. Arguing that television ‘serves to support the family in its isolation’, they quote Mr Minton saying ‘the tellie keeps the family together. None of us ever have to go out now.’Footnote 119 What they omit to mention is that Mr Minton acknowledged having been ‘a very heavy drinker’ before moving out to Debden. He viewed the change as ‘progress’, but Young and Willmott lament the abandonment of a superior (male) culture of ‘mateyness’.Footnote 120 They also play down the growth of television ownership in Bethnal Green, particularly among families with the same demographic profile as those at Debden, and ignore evidence of Debden families forced to give up their television on moving to Debden because of increased living expenses.Footnote 121
Perhaps more importantly, contrary to the argument in Family and kinship, when people passed judgement on neighbours, they still focused overwhelmingly on issues of behaviour and personality, just as they did in Bethnal Green – they did not feel so isolated from neighbours that they could know them only by superficial materialist markers of status.Footnote 122 Only Mrs Prince complained about ‘standoffish’ neighbours, and even she was focusing on behaviour, what she called ‘big-headedness’, rather than just superficial appearances. In only two other cases were respondents willing to voice criticism of particular neighbours, and in both cases, their sense of social distinction (what others might call their ‘snobbery’) was aimed at behaviour considered to be ‘low’. Mrs Rawson told Young, ‘I don't like [the] neighbours at all’, explaining ‘The next-door little girl speaks horrible, Crikey she does. I say to Jill [her daughter]: “Don't ever come in here talking like that, ever.” They [the children] go to bed at any hours. Sometimes it's 11·30. You can hear the doors slam.’Footnote 123 The other case involved the Maggs family, whom Young notes ‘spoke with more vehemence’ against their neighbours than on any other subject: ‘They have 6 children. They use the back as a toilet & pull up people's flowers. The father hasn't turned over a sod in his garden. He works for 3 weeks & then packs it in…3 of their neighbours have moved already.’Footnote 124 It was the Maggs who thought of themselves as ‘just lodging’ at Debden in 1953; the family most reluctant to cut their ties with Bethnal Green and keenest to return there if a house came up. But then, as we have seen, hostility to neighbours was not something spawned by the social dislocation of suburban life. It was one facet of a varied, socially adaptive popular culture that could be found as easily in Bethnal Green as Debden (just as its flipside, altruism and mutuality, could be found in Debden as well as Bethnal Green).
V
The sharp contrast between Firth's downbeat account of ‘community’ in Bermondsey and Young and Willmott's very different findings for Bethnal Green is striking, but so too is the different impact of the two studies. Firth's work went almost unnoticed, appearing as a short volume in a university monograph series on social anthropology. Young and Willmott's book was almost as short, but it was published by Routledge and Kegan Paul to general acclaim. There was widespread newspaper interest, and the BBC moved quickly to commission a radio programme, ‘Families on the move’, amplifying the authors’ key arguments through extensive use of vox-pop interviews.Footnote 125Family and kinship was a better read than Firth's dry recapitulation of family trees and kin relations, but it was also better politics. Firth and his team of anthropologists were avowedly apolitical and they revelled in the unfamiliar opportunity to be working in a field not tainted by colonial power.Footnote 126 Some members of Firth's team, most notably Audrey Richards, had always been sceptical about the concept of ‘community’, and this probably encouraged their quick abandonment of the hypothesis that dense kinship networks might provide the mainstay of neighbourhood cohesion in Bermondsey.Footnote 127 Young and Willmott were aware of this study, indeed they cited it as reinforcing their own conclusions about the matri-central character of working-class kinship.Footnote 128 However, they disregarded its findings about relations between both kin and neighbours, just as they ignored those voices from Bethnal Green and Debden which ran counter to their powerful central thesis about the cohesiveness and stability of working-class community (and hence its viability as a model for a new, decentralized social democratic politics).
The preceding re-analysis of the surviving interview-notes from Bethnal Green and Debden suggests that Young and Willmott found many of the same patterns that led Firth to abandon his belief in mutually reinforcing networks of kinship and community. But here, the voices that spoke of family feuding, hostile neighbours, tense mother/daughter relations, and a longing to escape to a new life, were dismissed as ‘exceptional’ or ‘aberrant’ because the authors’ ‘ideal-type’ account of family and community did not allow for diversity. It is not difficult to see why Young and Willmott struggled to give alternative voices due weight; in many respects their neglect was radically over-determined, as both men acknowledged in later life. Interviewed at the ICS in 2001, Young conceded that ‘we probably did overdo it…in one respect or another, we were biased’ – ‘we, undoubtedly, painted it…in too rosy colours’.Footnote 129
As Lise Butler has recently argued, Young's project to found an Institute of Community Studies had been intensely political from the outset.Footnote 130 Not only was the new body committed to the idea that working-class neighbourhoods such as Bethnal Green represented cohesive and organic ‘communities’ that needed to be protected from destruction by misguided reformers, but from the outset the ICS believed that community was sustained primarily by the social support networks of extended families, which must be preserved at all costs.Footnote 131 If Young and Willmott were hostile to new suburban developments like Debden, it was not because they shared a generic, upper-class distaste for their residents’ quiet, unassuming lives, it was because they believed that planning authorities were doing too little to provide choice for those who wished to stay put.
But if Family and kinship in East London was powerful politics, it was poor sociology. By exaggerating the communitarian character of old, working-class areas such as Bethnal Green, it undoubtedly provided a devastating critique of urban planners’ indifference to the lived environments that their policies promised to obliterate. But to maximize the political impact of their case, Young and Willmott had to mute the voices of working people who testified to the limits of community and kinship bonds, or to the positive attraction of moving to the new suburbs. They also had to draw an exaggerated picture of alienation and anomie among migrants to Debden. In consequence, their account presented a highly schematic, dichotomized picture of urban and suburban working-class culture. The surviving interview transcripts cut across their picture of ‘moving out’ as a great social and cultural rupture – the attractions of a home-centred life were not new; the counter-veiling pleasures of communal sociability were not forgotten. Perhaps the balance between the two had been reconfigured in the new environment of Debden, but continuity was as apparent as change.
Only by going back to the original testimonies can we begin to understand the complex mix of push and pull factors at work in the reconfiguration of nineteenth-century urban neighbourhoods, and hence urban popular culture, across the middle decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, it also quickly becomes apparent why a politics based around a mythologized picture of ‘community’ and the extended family was bound to fail. But their account of a supposedly ‘traditional’ working-class culture on the brink of dissolution has proved much more enduring. The surviving field-notes from Bethnal Green and Debden suggest that it too had only the shakiest foundations. There was no great moment of rupture, no cataclysmic exodus from mutualistic communitarianism to atomized, materialist individualism.
