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On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, theDaily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, theDaily Workerwas very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth century, highlighting aspects of the gendered and cultural ethos of teacher training. Local efforts to establish teacher training, and the wartime presence in the town of an evacuated women's teacher training college, provide a prism for the examination of transitions in social attitudes towards teaching as a profession, as do the educational aspirations of local working-class grammar school girls and boys during the 1940s/1950s. The paper then focuses on the establishment in 1963 of a 'new kind' of non-residential teacher training college and, in particular, on its introduction in the late 1960s of part-time provision designed specifically for 'married women'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his monumental treatment of class formation inThe Making of the English Working Class(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), E. P. Thompson presented a view of class as a ‘happening’ and attacked the liberal and ‘orthodox’ Marxist views of class as a ‘thing’. This paper argues that Thompson's book was primarily attempting to answer political questions of his own time, and more specifically the question of modern socialism. Exploring the theoretical arguments of class formation that influenced Thompson's oeuvre, the paper will also explore the connections between Thompson and ‘orthodox’ Marxism and challenge those who see Thompson's work as only a counterargument to scholars who treated class merely as an economic structure. For Thompson,The Makingwas not only a historical treatise, but an answer to both ‘Old’ and New Leftists who saw the working class mainly as an economic and cultural phenomenon, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how Paul Gilroy transformed hitherto dominant understandings of the relationship between race and class by developing an innovative account that foregrounded questions of racist oppression and collective resistance amid the organic crisis of British capitalism. The returns from this rethinking were profound in that he was able to make transparent both the structuring power of racism within the working class, and the necessity for autonomous black resistance. At the same time, significant lacunae in his account are identified, including the neglect of the episodic emergence of working-class anti-racism and the part played by socialists, particularly those of racialized minority descent in fashioning a major anti-racist social movement. The paper concludes with a lament for the disappearance of such work informed by a ‘Marxism without guarantees’ in the contemporary field of racism studies, and asks readers to consider the gains to be derived from such a re-engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines police intelligence columns in Chartist newspapers. Asking why Chartist papers would care to document working-class criminal activity, given that Chartists maintained that the 'people' were vote-ready, the paper argues that the columns show that crime and class are in fact not integrally related. Grouping well-to-do defendants with working-class counterparts allowed Chartists to demonstrate that money or property in themselves do not make for good citizenship and the right to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mechanics' institute movement of the British Isles has been underrated by some historians, who have argued that many of the institutes were attended by the middle and upper classes. In any case, they state that by the 1850s, they were declining in both popularity and usefulness. This paper questions these assumptions, concentrating on the developments at the Huddersfield Mechanics' Institute and comparing with other institutes both locally and nationally its responsiveness to local and national developments with regard to its contribution to education. Like many other institutes, Huddersfield provided a foundation on which twentieth-century further education was firmly established. Britain was not the only country to establish a mechanics' institute movement as similar developments were also taking place in other countries, particularly in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the transition from voluntaristic to state-led cultural provision after 1945 with the emergence in Britain of the Arts Council and its regional representatives. The chief ambition is to examine the concern over the cultural deficit of the industrial working class expressed by leading figures in the new arena of cultural policy such as Mary Glasgow and Lord Keynes. Drawing upon research from the North East Association for the Arts (established in 1961), which maintained links with the North East's political and economic establishment, this paper explores the experience of such metropolitan cultural imperatives in the Labour stronghold of the North East. It also seeks to examine how far the civic concern to improve popular sensibilities after 1945 was peculiar to British cultural policy. It asks whether there were similar movements to realize the improvement of working-class culture in comparable European regions, and considers the possibilities for a comparative or transnational approach to the history of European cultural policy during the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits sociological studies of Liverpool between 1956 and 1964 to challenge the prevailing emphasis on affluence in histories of post-war Britain. Vulnerability to poverty continued to shape working-class life, and the sociologists and their respondents drew on class to account for this. However, while the researchers used class as a social description, their respondents suggested that class was a dynamic social relationship within which they operated a degree of agency, albeit mediated by gender and locale. Their agency was not only facilitated by the development of a post-war welfare state, rather than by personal affluence, but also relied on older household economic strategies that highlight continuities with the pre-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Federation of Discharged and Demobilized Soldiers and Sailors has hitherto been neglected by historians of the Great War. This paper examines this radical ex-service organization in the context of working class communities and mentalities. This account of its rise and fall focuses on rural areas, especially the Welsh Marches. Here, while there were early and close links with local trade unions, by 1919 the Federation had become more conservative and soon declined. Although its decline mirrored the general history of this organization, the local cultural background, in particular the gentry paternalism of the Marches. ensured that the NFDDSS in this region was a short-lived phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]