The Soviet invasion of Hungary in late October 1956 resulted in the exodus of approximately two hundred thousand Hungarians, of whom approximately twenty-one thousand came to Britain within a matter of weeks. This article historicizes the process of reception and resettlement of Hungarian refugees in Britain. Through exploring the rhetoric used and attitudes displayed during the reception and resettlement process, it considers if and how legally recognized rights established for refugees under the 1951 UN Convention mediated their arrival and treatment. It finds a failure of a new discourse of rights to permeate the language surrounding their reception. Instead, well-worn tropes of the generosity of the British and their traditions of tolerance and hospitality were deployed consistently at national and local levels. This had the effect of implying that entry to Britain was a privilege and one not to be abused, and it marginalized refugees who failed to conform to particular expectations. The article argues that tying attitudes toward Hungarian refugees—variously positioned as “grateful” or “ungrateful”—can be usefully understood within the context of broader conceptions of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and their relationship with the (welfare) state. Consequently, along with exploring the experiences of reception and resettlement of Hungarians in 1956/7 the article contributes to understandings of behavior, rights, and welfare in postwar Britain.

This article offers a history of British alternative comedy as a case study of political challenge and opposition in the 1980s and considers the role of humor in political campaigning more broadly. It explores left-wing thinking on culture as a potential political weapon, and questions how this informed the development and impact of alternative comedy as a genre. The article observes that pioneering alternative comedians went some way to change British comedy values and inform political discussions. However, it also argues that the complex operation of jokes and the tendency of comedians to become “incorporated” within the political and cultural mainstream ensured that the impacts of radical alternative material were limited and ambiguous. It contends that the practice of alternative comedy was undermined by business and political values that were often influenced by Thatcherism, and that alternative comedians mostly failed to capture the imaginations of working-class Britons. These communities retained instead an affection for more traditional, differently rebellious, comedic voices. Ultimately, this article frames alternative comedy within a longer history of radical humor, drawing out broader lessons concerning the revolutionary potential of jokes and the relationship between comedians, their audiences, and politics.

In nineteenth-century Britain, friendly societies (working-class mutual benefit clubs) and ruling elites contested definitions of respectability and independence in a struggle to delineate relations between societies and the state. This process was an important part of an ongoing set of negotiations by which working-class organizations influenced middle-class attitudes toward collective action. Pressure from friendly societies forced members of Parliament and bureaucrats to accept their claim to respectability and, with it, to independence from state control, changing the discourse of respectability in three stages. During the first quarter of the century, clergymen and landowners equated respectability with middle-class patronage and independence from the Poor Law. Around midcentury, the societies appropriated the discourse of respectability and, with qualified elite approval, used it to redefine independence as freedom from middle-class supervision. By the 1870s, however, friendly society leaders requested government assistance to limit the independence of rank-and-file members, whose autonomy they claimed was a threat to the societies' respectability.

Friendly societies wanted, as one member wrote, “to do what is ‘respectable.’” This meant redefining respectability in a collective, working-class context. While middle-class definitions rested on the premise that individualism and self-help were the twin foundations of respectability, friendly societies gained access to the social power of respectability by offering an alternative definition based on collective self-help and independence from external control. Friendly societies were democratically managed insurance clubs offering sickness and burial coverage and sociable activities in return for regular payments. They often met in public houses, which they identified as respectable, contradicting middle-class attitudes.

This article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.

It is now over twenty years since Geoffrey Crossick first urged historians to investigate the English lower middle class. On that occasion he suggested that small business interests and white-collar employees be designated the two wings of a residual lower middle class. Historians speculated that the members of this class were bound together by their marginality to the social, cultural, and economic world of the middle class and by their pathetic attempts to ape the gentility of their superiors. Such an analysis confirmed the unheroic nature of the lower-middle-class mentalité and explains Crossick's conclusion that this group “claimed no vital social role.” Crossick's more recent work, in collaboration with Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, offers a reevaluation of this earlier position and concludes that white-collar and small business interests should not be considered to occupy the same social station. Crossick and Haupt's work is significant because both authors make it clear that they now credit the petite bourgeoisie of small business families in Europe with a greater spirit of independence than they had earlier acknowledged. They argue convincingly that the petite bourgeoisie created their own social and cultural world, centered on the interrelationship between enterprise and family life, which enabled them to react more purposefully to outside social forces and agencies.

By hiving off these small business interests from the old lower middle class, we are left with a rump of white-collar workers who collectively formed a lower middle class that shared many common experiences and hence is attractive to historians as a potentially more cohesive social body.

In an article in the Journal of British Studies in November 1965, Helen Taft Manning, referring particularly to the period 1830 to 1850, asked the question, “Who ran the British Empire?” She was especially concerned with the influence of the famous James Stephen, but her question raises matters of wider concern.

“Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change,” she wrote.

This legend is still to be found, as Mrs. Manning says, in general textbooks, among the more important of the fairly recent ones being E. L. Woodward's Age of Reform, and more surprisingly in the second volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Of course, Wakefield and the so-called colonial reformers are well recognized as propagandists.

This article examines pictures taken by the British photographer Roger Mayne of Southam Street, London, in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores these photographs as a way of thinking about the representation of urban, working-class life in Britain after the Second World War. The article uses this focused perspective as a line of sight on a broader landscape: the relationship among class, identity, and social change in the English city after the Second World War. Mayne's photographs of Southam Street afford an examination of the representation of economic and social change in the postwar city and, not least, the intersections among class, race, generation, and gender that reshaped that city.

During the century that has elapsed since Gladstone's famous Midlothian Campaigns of 1879–80, the British political parties have had to adjust to a series of major changes and developments in both the structure and the substance of politics: the extension of the parliamentary vote to all men and women over the age of eighteen; the move toward the direct taxation of incomes; the rise of a “welfare state”; the steady, if unspectacular, decline of British industry; two debilitating world wars; the retreat from empire; and the loss of major-power status. At first sight every one of these changes represents a problem for British Conservatives: they appear to have been perpetually working against the grain of history. Yet in the general election of 1885 the Conservatives achieved a 43.5 percent share of the popular vote, while in the election of June 1987 they won just 43 percent. Far from being pushed to the margins by more adaptable or more popular parties, they appear to be as strong and as central in the British political system as they ever were.

Of course, Conservative support has not been quite as stable as a comparison between 1885 and 1987 suggests. Their vote has indeed fluctuated, though within a fairly narrow range; the minimum is usually 38 percent to 39 percent, and the maximum around 48 percent (table 1).

This paper is concerned solely with the genesis of the 1903 Tariff Reform Movement. Why did a veteran, realistic politician like Joseph Chamberlain challenge Britain's long-sacrosanct free trade policy? What political, economic, social, or other factors influenced him to make his decision? Was he really the originator of the program which he championed? What empirical lessons can be learned about the methodology and rationale of political decision making? The existing scholarly works dealing with the Chamberlain agitation, although exceedingly numerous, provide no really satisfactory answers to these questions. Thus a fresh appraisal of the origins of the Tariff Reform Movement seems clearly warranted.

I

The Liberal journalist-statesman John Morley, who became acquainted with Chamberlain in 1873, is reported as once saying that his friend's faith in the free trade policy was always “only skindeep.” Chamberlain himself said that he was first shaken in his free trade beliefs in 1881 when, as President of the Board of Trade in the second Gladstone Government, he was asked to reply to a protectionist speech by a then-obscure Conservative M.P. named C. T. Ritchie. Contrary to Chamberlain and Morley, however, one of the Birmingham leader's official biographers states that he has found no indication that his hero entertained any fiscal heresies prior to the winter of 1902-03; and though the date he gives may be disputed, the view that Chamberlain was a late convert to protection is substantiated by considerable evidence. Chamberlain's reply to Ritchie, despite his later admission of doubt, reveals no misgivings about the free trade credo.

Historians of British socialism have tended to discount the significance of religious belief. Yet the conference held in Bradford in 1893 to form the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) was accompanied by a Labour Church service attended by some five thousand persons. The conference took place in a disused chapel then being run as a Labour Institute by the Bradford Labour Church along with the local Labour Union and Fabian Society. The Labour Church movement, which played such an important role in the history of British socialism, was inspired by John Trevor, a Unitarian minister who resigned to found the first Labour Church in Manchester in 1891. At the new church's first service, on 4 October 1891, a string band opened the proceedings, after which Trevor led those present in prayer, the congregation listened to a reading of James Russell Lowell's poem “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves,” and Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister, read Isaiah 15. The choir rose to sing “England Arise,” the popular socialist hymn by Edward Carpenter:

As the singing stopped, Trevor rose to give a sermon on the religious aspect of the labor movement. He argued the failure of existing churches to support labor made it necessary for workers to form a new movement to embody the religious aspect of their quest for emancipation.

Bentham has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, a controversy which has illuminated an important area of English social history but has left obscure an essential part of Bentham himself. The main point at issue has been his influence as a social reformer — the extent to which he was personally or ideologically responsible for the reforms of the nineteenth-century, ultimately the extent to which any person or ideology was responsible for those reforms. But a prior issue has been largely ignored. This is the question of his character as a social reformer, the character and quality of the reforms which he proposed and which are presumed to have inspired, or not to have inspired, the reforms later adopted. The only aspect of this question which has been raised is the hoary one of whether he was primarily a laissez-fairist or government-interventionist. And even here his general pronouncements have been quoted more often than his actual proposals for reform. For the rest, it has been assumed that his reforms were humane, benevolent, philanthropic, enlightened, rational, progressive; the words recur with tedious predictability in one account after another. Even those critics who have found his philosophy unsatisfactory have been content, and more than content, with his practical efforts to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But while we are often called upon to admire and emulate “the humble, rational, humanitarian spirit of this great man,” we are rarely shown the actual working and practical results of that spirit — the reforms themselves.

The prevailing view of Quakers in the Restoration era depicts them as a defeated movement no longer on the attack but henceforth under siege. They institutionalized, in the words of Richard Bauman, a strategy “of disengagement from the world's affairs” and embraced “a social policy founded on quietism.” Defeated politically, they were forced, according to this view, to relinquish their efforts to advance the cause of liberty “by militant, political means.” Thus the adoption of the peace principle as a hallmark of the Society of Friends emerged, according to Barry Reay, as a response to political defeat and as a stratagem for survival. This interpretation of Restoration Quakerism is similar in many respects to the stereotypical depiction of the Friends in terms of withdrawal and quiescence. I would like to suggest some modifications in this view by reexamining Quaker expectations at the Restoration, the Friends' involvement in political and legal matters, and the emergence and enforcement of the peace principle. The dominant characteristics of Restoration Quakerism are not withdrawal and quiescence but engagement and vigor.

Apparently no systematic effort has been made to ascertain whether a relation exists between the aesthetic theory of Burke's The Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and his political ideas. This omission would be readily understandable if the book were an insignificant and immature effort, or if the author at some later time had drastically altered his views, or if he had lost his interest in the arts. But all the evidence seems to be to the contrary. The work has been appraised as “among the most important documents of its century” to which men of great stature were indebted, including Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Hardy, Diderot, Lessing, and Kant. Although Burke did write a first draft while he was an undergraduate in Trinity College, Dublin, he continued to work upon it six or seven more years. Except for the extensive revisions for the second edition of 1759, revisions which did not modify the basic thesis, Burke evidently made no textual changes in the numerous subsequent editions. Nothing that Burke said or wrote indicates that he had second thoughts about the substance of the argument. And to the end of his days he maintained his vital interest in the arts. He was an intimate of Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the friend and patron of the two painters, George Barret and James Barry, and a member of the Royal Academy. Nor can the failure to consider the question of the connection between the aesthetics and the politics be due to the unfamiliarity of students of Burke's political thought with The Sublime and Beautiful.

The newspaper archive is, potentially, the largest untapped source of material concerning the popular belief in witchcraft and magic for the period after the formal cessation of the witchcraft trials in 1736. Several historians have successfully exploited the newspaper archive to examine popular customs in the modern period. However, little use has been made of newspapers to examine magical beliefs in the period defined by the decline of learned belief in witchcraft during the early eighteenth century and the eventual demise of popular belief in witchcraft two centuries later. Writing some fifty years ago, L. F. Newman noted that many witchcraft cases “only appear in the local Press of each district and extensive search is necessary to trace cases.” Newman hoped that his own very brief search would act as a catalyst for more intensive studies. Unfortunately, no one has conducted such work, and our understanding of the extent and influence of witchcraft and magic in the modern period is much the poorer for it. The present discussion, which seeks to begin that task, is based on short searches through various newspapers from around the country, the following up of secondary references, and an extensive, systematic ongoing survey of Somerset newspapers.

As Gustav Henningsen has observed, the newspaper has an important advantage over the folklore record in that it “always shows us the tradition in a concrete social context” and also provides a definite chronological basis. The combined exploration of folkloric sources and newspapers provides great potential for the regional study of witchcraft and magic in defined cultural settings.

Following the 1966 General Election, the Labour Party's Home Policy Committee observed that the party had, “for the first time, obtained a majority of the female vote” and remarked, “it would be very satisfactory if we could retain it.” Two years later, the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Party Organisation emphasized the “imperative that the Party concerns itself with how to win much more support among women.” These comments not only betrayed a serious weakness in Labour's electoral support between 1951 and 1966 but also acknowledged an important lacuna in its broader political outlook.

Given the party's electoral difficulties in the period after 1951, the first concern was particularly apposite. Beatrix Campbell, Nicky Hart, and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska have underlined the importance of this gender gap favoring the Conservatives after 1950 (see fig. 1). In the elections of 1951 and 1955, for example, Labour's vote among women lagged twelve and thirteen percentage points behind that of the Conservatives. Only in two elections between 1945 and 1970 did Labour enjoy leads among female voters, and these were much less substantial than those held by the Conservatives in 1951, 1955, 1959, and 1964. In rough numerical terms, this difference was potentially very significant. In 1951, for instance, women made up approximately 51.9 percent of the population of England, Scotland, and Wales and roughly 53.8 percent of those of voting age. With an electorate of 28.5 million, this meant a possible political advantage for the Conservatives of 1.2 million votes in an electoral contest where there were only .2 million votes between the two parties.