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This article augments the literature on the British experience of planning by examining attempts to plan the hospital system between 1962 and 1977. The Hospital Plan for England and Wales of 1962 proposed the construction of a suite of new 'District General Hospitals'. Underpinning this proposal was a belief in the value of standardized designs and construction methods, both of which were subsequently investigated in detail by the Ministry of Health and the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS). The history of this project reveals the challenges of putting centralized planning into practice. Yet while the standardization programme was scaled back in 1975, the article suggests that the drive to 'plan' modern Britain perhaps lasted longer than might initially be thought, into the 1980s, with implications for the way that the broader history of this period is framed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic 'first wave' folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a 'conservative modernity', which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a 'second wave' folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums' perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularization of antique collecting is typically located in the second half of the twentieth century, with the rise of 'retrochic' and the emergence of new markets and online trading websites for anonymously exchanging second-hand goods. Close study of the printed literature connected with the inter-war secondhand trade, however, challenges conventional chronologies in the history of consumer culture, and can provide a new perspective on the role of collecting in British social and cultural life. This article examines the period, after the late 1920s, during which The Bazaar, Exchange and Mart reinvented itself as a forum for antique and decorative art enthusiasts. It argues that, in speaking to and publishing contributions from so-called 'small collectors', this 'Popular Weekly for Collectors and Connoisseurs' helped shape a modern and democratic culture of art appreciation in which ordinary people were actively invited to participate. The private correspondence archive of a Buckinghamshire subscriber who used the Exchange and Mart to sell his collection of 'Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Antiquities' to readers across the country during the 1930s reveals an intimate portrait of the desires, fantasies, and pleasures associated with the popular experience of collecting in pre-war Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the decade following 1918, HMS Victory was restored as a memorial to the nation, empire, the Navy, and all the sailors who had lost their lives in the Great War. This piece of Britain's naval heritage became a focal point for Great War memory and a resource for narrating the Navy's place in post-war Britain. This article analyses the restoration campaign, focusing on its appeal work and the materials it produced, discourses surrounding the restoration and the use of Victory's oak to recover this ship's importance at the intersection between Britain and its Navy in the aftermath of the Great War, and the function that the Navy played in the construction of post-war memory and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article links two processes that reached culmination during the 1970s: the emergence in central government of concern for inner city areas, and the rejection of urban modernist approaches to the built environment. It focuses on the approach of the Department of the Environment in dealing with the issue, particularly through the three Inner Area Studies on Lambeth, Small Heath in Birmingham and Liverpool 8, which were published in 1977. The first section gives an account of the background under which the Studies were commissioned by the Department of the Environment, then headed by Conservative Secretary of State Peter Walker. Part two gives a brief account of the Studies. Part three details their reception under the Labour Government, and shows their influence on the 1977 White Paper Policy for the Inner Cities. Through this case study, two arguments are made about the changing approach to the built environment in the 1970s: that political and planning elites played a pivotal role in the disavowal of urban modernism in this period; and that the multiple problems exemplified by the inner city made modernist approaches appear increasingly untenable, even to former advocates. The conclusion suggests that, at least in its approach to the inner city, the meliorist aims of the post-war period were not an intellectually spent force by the 1970s, but remained an ambitious and evolving project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the entry of the USSR into the Second World War in June 1941, images of Soviet women proliferated in Britain. Official propaganda, parliamentary debate, and popular culture positioned self-sacrificing Soviet woman as models for British women’s behaviour in wartime: their wartime citizenship. The example of the Soviet woman also offered an opportunity for British to claim the full range rights of rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These ranged from arguments for better provision of childcare to, most controversially, the right to bear arms in the event of German invasion. These public protests came to nothing. Under pressure from the post-war repudiation of the gains women made during the war, the viability of pro-Soviet rhetoric was then fatally undermined by the advent of the Cold War. Nonetheless, women’s public and private admiration for their Soviet contemporaries aided the project of refashioning citizenship’s boundaries across the public and private spheres. Evidence from these contests also points to new ways of approaching questions about British political culture from the 1930s through to the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The vernacularization of voice-recording technology over the course of the past century means that we have largely forgotten what a strange and quasi-magical thing it is to preserve someone’s voice. This article, first delivered as the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, traces the development of voice-recording technologies in the twentieth century from gramophone records to miniaturized mobile devices. It argues that the recording of the voice led to a renewed awareness of the voice as a trained instrument, as a marker of individual identity, and as a way of immortalizing speech and preserving an auditory remnant of people after their deaths. Recording technologies extended the range of voices that could be heard by taking the BBC and other voice capturers beyond the London-based live studios and what Lord Reith referred to as the anonymous ‘collective personality’ of the radio announcers; and it made people listen intently to voices as both expressions of the self and as vehicles for communicating with others. The voice recording technologies of the past century were essentially democratizing, allowing the ‘voice of the people’ to be heard in authentic everyday settings, albeit in fragmentary and imperfect ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides the first in-depth account of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–10). In a period of intensifying labour unrest, young female servants working in private homes attempted to organize their own trade unions. Short-lived and disrupted by the First World War, their efforts left little formal documentation and have never before been the subject of historical study. Their activities can, however, be traced in the pages of women’s movement periodicals and the correspondence columns of local and radical newspapers. The idea of organizing domestic servants as workers was an anathema to many in both the labour and the women’s movements. Nevertheless, the Domestic Workers’ Union provides a fascinating case study of how, in this moment of exceptional social unrest, elements of trade unionism and feminism converged to challenge entrenched gendered divisions between the public and the private, the workplace and the home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Race Relations Act of 1965 has been remembered by historians as one prong of a governmental strategy to deal with the impact of black and Asian post-war immigration to Britain, an attempt to improve inter-group relations at the same time as efforts were being made to restrict Commonwealth immigration. This iconic Act was the first to criminalize racial discrimination and outlaw the incitement of racial hatred. This article focuses on the creation and use of one part of this new law, Section Six, the incitement clause. It argues that early patterns of prosecution under this legislation reveal a government agenda which was not solely focused on the protection of black and Asian Britons but instead on longer-running issues relating to the tolerance of political violence. Far from simply outlawing racism, this article argues that the incitement clause ultimately enabled a re-articulation of racial discourse, tweaking the linguistic parameters of racist agitation while consciously allowing for its continuation. In doing so, it reflected a nation which was still unsure about the merits of multiculturalism, where it remained largely acceptable to argue that black and Asian Britons did not belong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as the British government expanded its social programs, and private charities and co-operative associations began to offer more benefits, birth certificates became essential to the bureaucratic process of establishing both age and identity. But every time a birth certificate was produced, it made the private circumstances of an individual’s birth public knowledge. For those born out of wedlock, handing over these certificates was often stigmatizing at a time when illegitimacy remained for many a shameful family secret. When the government finally introduced an abbreviated birth certificate in 1947, which documented name, sex, and birth date without reference to parentage, they were responding to long-standing concerns both within and beyond the state bureaucracy about the tension inherent in keeping public records about people’s private lives. The emergence of the short form birth certificate is thus part of a much larger human story that can help us to map significant shifts in the relationship between the individual citizen and the modern state in the information age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Twopenny libraries first appeared in North London in 1930 and quickly spread throughout urban Britain. Their innovation was to dispense with subscription fees and charge per loan. Unlike older commercial libraries such as Mudie’s, twopenny libraries served a working-class clientele. Some twopenny libraries were standalone businesses. Many more were sidelines to existing businesses such as tobacconists’ and newsagents’ shops. Library services could be profitable in their own right, but often their main value to their proprietors was to bring customers into the shop more regularly. Established players in the book trade initially responded to twopenny libraries with alarm, but the threat they posed was limited. Their market was not the same as those of booksellers. Some public librarians made arguments along these lines about the twopenny libraries’ impact on public libraries; certainly, the two types of institution coexisted. Twopenny libraries carried a lot of so-called light fiction, but they also lent working-class readers the ‘middlebrow’ bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s. The wider significance of the twopenny library lies in the way it problematizes the distinction commonly made between a middle-class public for new hardcover novels and a working-class readership of fiction that appeared in cheap papers and magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay uses the autobiographical and journalistic work of the confidence trickster Netley Lucas to explore the possibilities and problems of writing as an ex-crook in inter-war Britain. In so doing, it considers the intersections between emerging forms of mass culture, popular and scientific narratives of criminality, and increasingly heated debates about the social and institutional management of crime. This case study provides an opportunity to think critically about the extent to which inter-war criminology was the modernizing project it often claimed to be. In the hands of Lucas and others, different modes of writing about crime bled into one another. Older forms of criminal confession coexisted with ‘modern’ criminological knowledge as mutually constitutive ways of apprehending the social. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers global perspectives on 20th century British history from Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Africa. In Australia, the author discusses migrants from Britain, the British influences within Australian media, and how British history is taught at universities. In South Africa, the author discusses British identity, culture, and politics in relation to South African historical work. In Japan, the author discusses how the economic and social history of Britain has served as model for modernization. In Hong Kong, the author discusses how British colonial influences have led to internationalization.

The British government made secret preparations for nuclear conflict throughout the Cold War. Following the disbandment of the Civil Defence Corps in 1968, resources for the defence of civilians were dramatically reduced. The sole measure undertaken after 1968 to minimize civilian casualties in the event of a conflict was the preparation of a public information campaign, Protect and Survive. The material advised civilians to ‘stay at home’ and build makeshift fallout shelters. This article examines the production of Protect and Survive, and some public responses to it. It will be argued that civil servants were left little option but to knowingly prepare inadequate and misleading advice. Public criticism was shaped by anxieties about the likelihood of nuclear conflict, and the impossibility of adequate defence. The individual was seen to be utterly helpless in the face of a nuclear attack. Older institutions designed to facilitate patriotic collective engagement with cold war defence, such as the Civil Defence Corps, were not revived. The government was attacked both by campaigners for improved civil defence, and by a revived and intellectually fertile anti-nuclear movement. Each of these political initiatives represented attempts to develop forms of active cold war citizenship, in contrast to the passivity advised by the state via Protect and Survive. Criticism of the material can therefore be seen to be rooted in a growing scepticism about the state’s ability to act effectively in the interests of the majority, in war as in economic management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the political and economic factors affecting the rebuilding of Britain’s provincial blitzed cities following the Second World War. Historians of planning have been prolific in their research on this period, but only from the perspective of planning visions and their reality, not the detailed steps that had to be followed towards implementation. This essay argues that, beyond the exigencies of an austere economic situation, both the Investment Programmes Committee—a Cabinet-level committee—and the planning legislation in the 1940s deeply affected the progress of rebuilding. Cities had to deal with constraints both obvious and hidden. After the Second World War, Britons lived in a world built not only by the visions of architects and planners, but also by developers, builders, and the desires of local authorities all working within a national political and economic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the extent to which post-war concerns about Englishness and fears about ‘the enemy within’ shaped understandings of the ‘racecourse wars’ of the 1920s. These conflicts involved mainly metropolitan criminals in various affrays and fights on the streets of London, and on the racecourses of South-East England. The press coverage of the events has been described as akin to a ‘moral panic’ and certainly they provided serious headline fodder during the peaks of 1922 and 1925. Moreover, the key personnel of these ‘wars’, arguably dramatically overwritten by the press, have become signposts in the chronology of twentieth-century British organized crime. This article will draw upon newspaper reports, police autobiography, trial reports, Metropolitan Police records and correspondence with the army to explore concerns about the nature and prevalence of gang crime and forms of inter-personal violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will look at one of the key aspects in the role of local government in post-war Britain by considering how local authorities adopted broadly entrepreneurial strategies, working in partnership with the private sector, to attract investment and redevelop large sections of Britain’s major city centres from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Focusing on some of the traditional industrial cities, it will examine the idea of the entrepreneurial city and how, while it has come to partially define the role of local government from the 1980s onwards, broadly similar approaches and attitudes to city-centre development were a marked feature of the role of local government policies from a much earlier period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a roundtable discussion sponsored by the journal on the study of 20th century British history in Western Europe. The article features scholars from France and Germany including Martina Steber of the German Historical Institute in London, England, Antoine Capet of the Université de Rouen, and Laura Lee Downs of the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales.

An essay is presented on the history of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Great Britain since 1945. It examines the relationship between NGOs and political activism and engagement. The author particularly explores environmental NGOs and NGOs committed to international development and aid. He links support for NGOs to declining public trust in elected officials and political institutions. The role of professional and technocratic expertise in NGOs is also considered.

The decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War saw Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race of unprecedented expense against the German empire. The spiralling cost of armaments proved politically problematic for a Liberal ministry ostensibly committed to ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform’. Outside the government, however, an organized navalist lobby agitated enthusiastically for ever greater levels of defence preparedness. Groups such as the Navy League have typically been regarded as bastions of the radical right. In fact, as this article demonstrates, Liberal engagement with and participation in the navalist lobby was far greater than historians have realized. Liberal MPs accounted for a significant portion of the Navy League’s support within Parliament, and Liberals held many leadership positions in the organization. These men were motivated by considerations of national defence, but they also identified their navalism as belonging to a coherent Liberal political tradition. The navy had long been associated with progressive political causes, above all with the maintenance of free trade, and was regarded as being free from the more regressive forms of militarism associated with standing armies. In this sense, navalism was not simply a phenomenon of the radical right; it also represented a distinctly Liberal form of militarism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses moral and sexual changes in Great Britain in the post-World War II era, examining the notion of a permissive society. It explores the influence of the state and the press and comments on the role of London, England in these transformations. The author also reflects on sexual scandals, particularly noting an affair between British war minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler, the supposed mistress of a Russian spy. An inquiry into sexual reform led by John Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden, also known as Lord Wolfenden, is also considered.

The English ‘sexual revolution’ has recently become increasingly conceived as ‘long’, lasting many decades, and by some historians as a gradual phenomenon, but reaching a peak with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the 1960s. At the same time, the ‘religious crisis’ of the same decade has been attributed by some recent scholarship to liberal Christian revolt within the churches, and largely unconnected with sex. This article offers different views. First, based on the illegitimacy rate, it argues that, after a period of decline, restraint, and only minor change in the period 1946–59, the 1960s witnessed a sudden growth in pre-marital heterosexual intercourse before the pill’s availability to single women, implying a cultural rather than a technological cause. Second, based on contemporary social surveys, it argues that there is clear evidence of a strong inverse correlation between levels of religious activity and levels of pre-marital sexual intercourse. Third, it argues that in the 1950s the dominant conservative Christian culture restrained single women from pre-marital sexual intercourse, but that from the early 1960s changing attitudes led to rising levels of sexual activity, led by single women, which reduced religious attitudes and Christian churchgoing, thus constituting a significant instigator of the religious crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of voluntary organizations in British political and civic life in the early- and mid-twentieth century. It examines various types of organizations, including voluntary agencies and women's groups, particularly those campaigning for women's suffrage. The author comments on the book "Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911," by Keith Middlemas, particularly considering Middlemas' writings about trade unions and employers’ associations.

This article describes one of the lesser known social surveys of the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and looks at its origins and its outcomes. Funded by the Rockefeller grant to Oxford University to enhance social studies there, the Oxford Survey published in two volumes in 1938 and 1940 engaged Oxford academics from agricultural economics, economics, statistics, and government, as well as Barnett House members involved in voluntary organizations, adult education, settlements, citizenship, and social work. It was a far-reaching study that aimed to analyse all aspects of public services, in the context of a thorough-going description of the geography, industry, and population statistics of the local area. It was also designed to have national relevance, because of the development of the motor industry in Cowley. The Oxford Survey differed from Booth and Rowntree’s exploration of the habits and circumstances of the urban poor. Instead, it had more affinity to surveys of industrial and regional planning and work coming from the Le Play school, in which the act of surveying communities was perceived as a way of enhancing citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early cold war, the British government founded a voluntary civil defence service designed to protect the nation and the population from the effects of enemy attack in the event of war. Although civil defence was a site of massive voluntary effort—around 500,000 people joined—it was also considered a ‘failure’. This article examines the propaganda utilized to recruit these volunteers in the ‘atomic age’, and argues that the messages used reveal a range of concerns about the conflict, patriotism, and voluntarism in the early post-war years that existed in tension. In particular, it analyses the tensions between duty and service on the one hand, and leisure on the other, symptomatic of the wider debates surrounding citizenship and participation in the period. It also explains the importance of the Second World War and the gendered perceptions of civil defence in attempting to mobilize potential recruits. The article concludes that civil defence propaganda succeeded in mobilizing significant levels of participation, but was perceived as a failure due to an understanding of patriotic citizenship rooted in the cultural context of the Second World War. In a period of cultural change, propaganda began to emphasize leisure as well as duty, but struggled to reconcile the two messages in a way capable of convincing recruits in large enough numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the First World War, the British government put into operation a Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire. This scheme was driven by a complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies. This article examines the Free Passage Scheme, paying particular attention to the ways in which it was envisaged as a means of restoring a gendered balance of the population in Britain, where young women outnumbered young men at the end of the war, and in the dominions, where men outnumbered women, and was also seen as a way of emigrating women whose wartime work experiences were understood to be in conflict with gendered identities in the post-war period. The article argues that the Free Passage Scheme needs to be understood as gendered, as it envisaged the transformation of female members of the auxiliary wartime services into domestic servants for the Dominions. The scheme’s failure, it is argued, prefigures the failure of the far larger Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a roundtable of reflections discussing the contributions and potential trajectory of British historical studies from scholars in the United States and Canada. Questions addressed within the section include the status of teaching 20th-century British history and issues at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the methodology and historiography used by North American scholars, and the influence of imperialism and globalization in the examination of 20th-century history. Multiple entries also reflect on the individual accomplishments of the authors as historians within the field.

In contemporary culture, soldiers held as prisoners-of-war (POWs) or as hostages are considered at significant risk of mental illness, in particular post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This assumption contrasts with the psychiatric orthodoxy of the First World War when it was concluded in both Britain and Germany that POWs were protected against ‘war neurosis’. Although ‘barbed wire disease’ was identified during time of captivity, post-release effects were not recognized. The repatriation of ‘protected’ POWs in 1943 prompted a reassessment of the psychological impact of imprisonment when servicemen of previous good character began to behave aberrantly. Rehabilitation programmes were designed to enable soldiers to re-adapt to service or civilian roles. Difficulties of adjustment were cast in social and cognitive terms, and corrective measures were occupational and educational. Psychiatric disorders found in POWs were explained in terms of a pre-conflict predisposition to, or a history of, mental illness. However, retrospective studies of veteran POWs have found a high prevalence of PTSD. A change in attitudes is explored in relation to the advance of medical terminology into the territory of emotions and the attribution of pathological processes to self-recovering mental states. The reclassification of the effects of imprisonment implies that diagnoses in military psychiatry are culturally determined and can be understood only if they are placed in a context that includes changing beliefs about mental illness, the formal development of the psychiatric profession and the immediate needs of the armed forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the articulation and reflection of Britishness by leaders and members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1960s. Members of CND believed that Britain had a distinctive world role which was founded on, and informed by, their morality. This morality, like the British character it helped to define, was not static but ever changing. CND was thus not simply reflecting existing ideas and attitudes to Britishness—although it did do this particularly in relation to domestic British values—but also wanted to be at the forefront in helping to define what British morality should be. CND thus articulated a Britishness that was both domestically conservative and internationally progressive. This article explores how attitudes towards Britain’s international role and the domestic identity of Britons informed one another through CND's conception of a uniquely British morality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the 2009 Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, delivered by Peter Hennessy, a professor of British history at Queen Mary, University of London. The speech focuses on British government documents related to the Cold War, noting that many were released by the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to the British Public Record Office (PRO) under the "Waldegrave Initiative" campaign. The 1970 British "Government War Book" and policies for military mobilization are explored.

British foreign policy in the 1930s is often considered utilizing the paradigm of appeasement. This, however, is an inadequate and retrospective tool, as it narrows the range of issues that can be dealt with and analyses them only as they can be considered to be pro- or anti-appeasement. Looking at the career of Sir Orme Sargent, one of the most important men in the Foreign Office during this period, it becomes clear that many of the major decisions of the period were taken in the light of whether they were consistent with the principles of the new international order established in 1919 rather than whether they contributed to the ‘appeasement’ of such countries as Germany, Italy and Japan. It also reveals that there were sharply different opinions in the Foreign Office about such matters, particular with regard to how to square France’s desire for security with Germany’s insistence on being treated as an equal, whether France’s network of alliances (particularly with Soviet Russia) damaged or enhanced Britain’s own security and whether the latter could be achieved by means of collective action within the precepts of the League of Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to a section of the journal is presented in which the authors examine an article on twentieth century British voluntary organizations and an article on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in British civic life.